Preliminary study on multifunctional bioreactor for in vitro tissue engineering

ABSTRACT Arterial bypass and heart valve replacements are two of the most common surgical treatments in cardiovascular surgery today. At the present time artificial materials are used as substitute for these cardiac tissues. However, these foreign materials do not have the ability to grow, repair, or remodel and are thormbogenic, which leads to stenosis. With tissue engineering it is possible to develop functional identical copies of healthy heart valves and arteries, which are biocompatible. In this paper we discuss the development of a multi-functional bioreactor for in vitro tissue engineering that provides a physiological pressure and flow of nutrient medium for the development of both arteries and heart valves. The whole system is compact and can be placed in an incubator for contamination resistance. Moreover, the proposed reactor design, besides mimicking in vivo conditions, is highly flexible, allowing the tissue culture of different types of tissues, arteries and heart valves to be engineered under the correct hemodynamic stresses.