From cardiac tissue engineering to heart-on-a-chip: beating challenges

Abstract

The heart is one of the most vital organs in the human body, which actively pumps the blood through the vascular network to supply nutrients to as well as to extract wastes from all other organs, maintaining the homeostasis of the biological system. Over the past few decades, tremendous efforts have been exerted in engineering functional cardiac tissues for heart regeneration via biomimetic approaches. More recently, progresses have been achieved towards the transformation of knowledge obtained from cardiac tissue engineering to building physiologically relevant microfluidic human heart models (i.e. heart-on-chips) for applications in drug discovery. The advancement in the stem cell technologies further provides the opportunity to create personalized in vitro models from cells derived from patients. Here starting from the heart biology, we review recent advances in engineering cardiac tissues and heart-on-a-chip platforms for their use in heart regeneration and cardiotoxic/cardiotherapeutic drug screening, and then briefly conclude with characterization techniques and personalization potential of the cardiac models.

A cost-effective fluorescence mini-microscope for biomedical applications

“…Heart-on-a-chip provides a viable platform for not only studying the biology but also screening cardiotoxic pharmaceutical compounds. 39, 40, 44 Here we built a cardiac bioreactor to evaluate the capability of the mini-microscope to analyze the beating of the heart-on-a-chip (Figure 5e). A mixture of GelMA prepolymer and CNT was sandwiched between two glass surfaces spaced at 1 mm and UV-cured.…”

Laser-assisted biofabrication in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine

“…To successfully reproduce and control the local cellular microenvironment, microtechnology-based tissue engineering approaches provide the capacity of positioning and printing biomaterials and cells with high spatial and temporal resolution. 2 More recently, the miniaturization of tissue formation toward organ-on-a-chip system, 3,4 aims to fabricate microphysiological systems that are favorably comparable with the functionality of real organs.…”

Towards engineering integrated cardiac organoids: beating recorded

“…To date, a variety of microphysiological systems have been developed that model their respective tissues and organs (and their disease states) of the human body, ranging from those mimicking the nervous system (11), the respiratory system (12,13), the digestive system (14,15), and the musculoskeletal system (16,17) to the cardiovascular system (18,19), covering essentially every single type of tissue and organ (4,5). Among all, the cardiac organoids have attracted increasing attention due to their critical roles in toxicology; for example, it is estimated that cardiotoxicity represents a major side effect of systemic drug toxicityin the past 40 years 19% of drug recalls were likely due to cardiotoxicity (20).…”

“…Besides cardiomyocytes, approximately half of the cells in the heart are cardiac fibroblasts that produce the connective and elastic extracellular matrix (ECM) of the Editorial Towards engineering integrated cardiac organoids: beating recorded heart wall (21). Other important cell populations include the cardiac signal conduction system made of pacemakers cells and Purkinje fibers (21), as well as the endothelial cells that form the vasculature and supply nutrients to the cardiac cells (18).…”