Cardiovascular Research Advance Access first published online on June 6, 2008
This version [Corrected Proof] published online on June 23, 2008
Cardiovascular Research, doi:10.1093/cvr/cvn149
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Porous tissue grafts sandwiched with multilayered mesenchymal stromal cell sheets induce tissue regeneration for cardiac repair
1 Department of Chemical Engineering, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan 30013, Republic of China
2 Division of Cardiovascular Surgery, Veterans General Hospital-Taichung, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China
3 College of Medicine, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China
4 Division of Cardiology, Veterans General Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan, Republic of China
5 Bioresource Collection and Research Center, Food Industry Research and Development Institute, Hsinchu, Taiwan, Republic of China
* Corresponding author. Tel: +886 3 574 2504; fax: +886 3 572 6832. E-mail address: hwsung{at}che.nthu.edu.tw (H.-W.S.) or ychang{at}vghtc.gov.tw (Y.C.)
Aims: To provide the basis for uniform cardiac tissue regeneration, a spatially uniform distribution of adhered cells within a scaffold is a prerequisite. To achieve this goal, a bioengineered tissue graft consisting of a porous tissue scaffold sandwiched with multilayered sheets of mesenchymal stromal cells was developed.
Methods and results: This tissue graft (sandwiched patch) was used to replace the infarcted wall in a syngeneic Lewis rat model with an experimentally chronic myocardial infarction (MI). There were four treatment groups (n 
10): sham, MI, empty patch, and sandwiched patch. After a 7 day culture of the sandwiched patch, a tissue graft with relatively uniform cell concentrations was obtained. The cells were viable and tightly adhered to the tissue scaffold, as the endogenous extracellular matrix inherent with multilayered cell sheets can act as an adhesive agent for cell attachment and retention. At retrieval, the area of the empty patch was relatively enlarged, suggesting reduced structural support, while that of the sandwiched patch remained about the same (P = 0.56). In the immunofluorescent staining, host cells together with neo-microvessels were clearly observed in the empty patch; however, there were still a large number of unfilled pores within the patch. In the sandwiched patch, besides host cells, originally seeded cells were populated within the entire patch. No apparent evidence of apoptotic cell death was found in both studied patches. Thus, the sandwiched-patch-treated hearts demonstrated a better heart function to the empty-patch-treated hearts (P < 0.05).
Conclusion: The results demonstrated that this novel bioengineered tissue graft can serve as a useful cardiac patch to restore the dilated left ventricle and stabilize heart functions after MI.
KEYWORDS Myocardial infarction; Angiogenesis; Tissue regeneration; Scaffold; Cell-sheet engineering
Time for primary review: 23 days
The first two authors (C.-H.C., H.-J.W.) contributed equally to this work.