Miniature sensorized platform for engineered heart tissues

Abstract

The high death toll of cardiovascular diseases worldwide and the lack of effective treatments for them are the main motivation for developing alternative and more efficient models for cardiac drug development and disease research. The missing link between current laboratory research on static in vitro and animal models and the clinical stage research on human patients could be created using the rapidly emerging Organ-on-Chip (OoC) technology. Themicrophysiological models developed within OoC research combine devices made of biocompatible, soft materials and human-origin organ-specific cell types, which are then exposed to flow, chemical, electrical or biomechanical stimuli.
Modeling a human cardiac in vivo environment in an artificial model represents quite a challenge from several aspects. First, cardiac tissue in vivo is exposed to a strong coupling between different biomechanical and electrical stimuli that need to be faithfully captured by an in vitro model. Furthermore, such an in vitro model should recapitulate the complexity of cell-cell and cell-extracellular matrix (ECM) interactions between different cardiac cell types, while obtaining physiologically relevant responses. This thesis addresses the first challenge, in an attempt to engineer a dynamic, artificial microenvironment, suitable for the growth, monitoring, and stimulation of hiPSC-based engineered cardiac tissues (EHTs).....