Electrically conductive materials for in vitro cardiac microtissue engineering

Abstract

Cardiac tissue engineering, a fairly new concept in cardiovascular research, could substantially improve our success in both in vitro modeling of cardiac microtissue and in vivo cardiac regenerative medicine. To a large extent, this success was attributed to mechanical as well as electrical properties of cardiac‐designated biomaterials which inherit the fundamental characteristics of a native myocardial extracellular matrix. Large efforts have been made toward designation and construction of these scaffolds which paved the way for more natural‐like biomaterials. As an important characteristic, electrical conductivity has grabbed special attention, thus opening up a whole new area of research to achieve the best biomaterial. Electroconductive scaffolds have benefitted from both incorporation of conductive particles in polymeric matrix and fabrication of organic conductive polymers which supported cardiac tissue engineering. However, conductive scaffolds have not yet achieved full success and more work is required to obtain the optimal conductivity with highest similarity to the native heart for in vitro cardiac microtissue engineering.

Plasticized poly(vinylalcohol) and poly(vinylpyrrolidone) based patches with tunable mechanical properties for cardiac tissue engineering applications

“…biomaterials have been tested for their use as scaffold to provide three‐dimensional microenvironment for supporting the growth and survival of cardiomyocytes (CMs) (Gil‐Castell et al, 2020; Kaiser et al, 2019; Pushp & Ferreira, Cabral, et al, 2017; Pushp et al, 2019; Rachel et al, 2020). Properties such as mechanical strength, cyto‐compactibility, electrical conductivity, porosity, high surface to mass ratio, high oxygen carrying potential, and so forth are important in the selection of biomaterial for fabricating scaffolds for CTE (Baei et al, 2020; Nikolova & Chavali, 2019; Zhang et al, 2019). In addition, to be used as cardiac patch, the tensile strength of the biomaterials should have a Young's modulus of 0.02–0.5 MPa to resemble those of the native human heart (Reis et al, 2016).…”

Cardiac mechanostructure: Using mechanics and anisotropy as inspiration for developing epicardial therapies in treating myocardial infarction

“…Additionally, electrically conductive scaffolds for cardiac tissue engineering has been an important and innovative field in ensuring proper and mature electrical activity of engineered tissue. A variety of materials such as gold nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes, graphene, polypyrrole and polyaniline have been utilized; these materials and their impact on engineered cardiac tissue is reviewed in great detail by Baei et al [ 273 ].…”

Advances in tissue engineering of the cardiac muscle for myocardial regeneration

“…It has been applicated in the construction of different engineered tissues like cornea (37), skin (38), oral mucosa (24) and peripheral nerve (39) among others, and they have shown that the nanostructuration and cross-linking techniques improved the biomechanical and structural properties of different biomaterials. For cardiac tissue engineering, it is crucial the development of electrically conductive hydrogels to achieve the spontaneous beating behaviour of the heart, in order to accomplished the functional regeneration (8,40).…”