Abstract
In vitro cardiovascular disease models need to recapitulate tissue-scale function in order to provide in vivo relevance. We have developed a new method for measuring the contractility of engineered cardiovascular smooth and striated muscle in vitro during electrical and pharmacological stimulation. We present a growth theory-based finite elasticity analysis for calculating the contractile stresses of a 2D anisotropic muscle tissue cultured on a flexible synthetic polymer thin film. Cardiac muscle engineered with neonatal rat ventricular myocytes and paced at 0.5 Hz generated stresses of 9.2 ± 3.5 kPa at peak systole, similar to measurements of the contractility of papillary muscle from adult rats. Vascular tissue engineered with human umbilical arterial smooth muscle cells maintained a basal contractile tone of 13.1 ± 2.1 kPa and generated another 5.1 ± 0.8 kPa when stimulated with endothelin-1. These data suggest that this method may be useful in assessing the efficacy and safety of pharmacological agents on cardiovascular tissue.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 3613-3621 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Biomaterials |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue number | 13 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - May 2010 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We acknowledge financial support from the DARPA Biomolecular Motors Program and PREVENT program , NIH R01HL079126-01A2 , and the Harvard Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) .
Keywords
- Cardiac tissue engineering
- Cardiomyocyte
- Mechanical properties
- Smooth muscle cell
- Soft tissue biomechanics
- tissue biomechanics
