Evaluation of Biointegration and Inflammatory Response to Blood Vessels Produced by Tissue Engineering—Experimental Model in Rabbits

Abstract

Peripheral arterial disease (PAD) is the main cause of mortality in the western population and requires surgical intervention with the use of vascular substitutes, such as autologous veins or Dacron or PTFE prostheses. When this is not possible, it progresses to limb amputation. For cases where there is no autologous vascular substitute, tissue engineering with the production of neovessels may be a promising option. Previous experimental studies have shown in vitro that rabbit vena cava can be decellularized and serve as a scaffold for receiving mesenchymal stem cells (MSC), with subsequent differentiation into endothelial cells. The current study aimed to evaluate the behavior of a 3D product structure based on decellularized rabbit inferior vena cava (IVC) scaffolds seeded with adipose-tissue-derived stem cells (ASCs) and implanted in rabbits dorsally subcutaneously. We evaluated the induction of the inflammatory response in the animal. We found that stem cells were positive in reducing the inflammatory response induced by the decellularized scaffolds.

Deciphering Key microRNA Regulated Pathways in Tissue-Engineered Blood Vessels: Implications for Vascular Scaffold Production

“…When using biological scaffolds, the native architecture is highly preserved, and the antigen content is removed during the decellularization process [ 41 , 42 , 43 ]. The use of decellularized veins as biological scaffolds for tissue engineering in blood vessels was chosen as a biocompatible, resistant, and adaptable 3D tubular structure, which had good results in cell culture in experiments previously carried out by our study team [ 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 ].…”