Nanomaterials for Cardiac Myocyte Tissue Engineering

Abstract

Since their synthesizing introduction to the research community, nanomaterials have infiltrated almost every corner of science and engineering. Over the last decade, one such field has begun to look at using nanomaterials for beneficial applications in tissue engineering, specifically, cardiac tissue engineering. During a myocardial infarction, part of the cardiac muscle, or myocardium, is deprived of blood. Therefore, the lack of oxygen destroys cardiomyocytes, leaving dead tissue and possibly resulting in the development of arrhythmia, ventricular remodeling, and eventual heart failure. Scarred cardiac muscle results in heart failure for millions of heart attack survivors worldwide. Modern cardiac tissue engineering research has developed nanomaterial applications to combat heart failure, preserve normal heart tissue, and grow healthy myocardium around the infarcted area. This review will discuss the recent progress of nanomaterials for cardiovascular tissue engineering applications through three main nanomaterial approaches: scaffold designs, patches, and injectable materials.

The influence of electrically conductive and non-conductive nanocomposite scaffolds on the maturation and excitability of engineered cardiac tissues

“…We also speculate that the presence of nanomaterials within the matrix of scaffold can be resulted in other unique interactions with cells, for example through the adsorbed proteins on the surface of nanomaterials, [60][61][62] that have been shown to exert significant impact on functionalities of CMs. [63][64][65] Despite the significance of our study, there are other techniques that can be utilized to further improve our mechanistic understanding of cell-matrix interactions and the role of conductivity on the functionalities of engineered cardiac tissues. For example, in our study we focused on the tissue-level electrical excitability of engineered cardiac constructs via utilizing an electric field stimulation chamber.…”

State-of-Art Functional Biomaterials for Tissue Engineering

“…Nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs) (Martinelli et al, 2012;Patel et al, 2016), gold (Au) nanorods (Fleischer et al, 2014;Navaei et al, 2016Navaei et al, , 2017Shin et al, 2016), graphene oxide (GO) nanoflakes (Shevach et al, 2013;Park et al, 2015a), silicon nanowires (Park et al, 2015b;Tan et al, 2017), and iron oxide (Han et al, 2015;Richards et al, 2016) in conjugation with the extracellular and intercellular microenvironments of transplanted cells are believed to enable regeneration of injured CMs Amezcua et al, 2016;Mehrali et al, 2017). Regenerative properties of CMs can be measured by obtaining electrical conductivity, protein adsorption affinity, intracellular signaling pathways, and magnetic properties.…”

Nanomaterials as potential and versatile platform for next generation tissue engineering applications

“…Furthermore, nanotechnology can be applied to construct NMs for cardiac myocytes TE. Various nanosized biomimetic structures have been utilized for the tissue regeneration process through cell/drug delivery, such as electrospun scaffolds, self‐assembling peptides, peptide amphiphiles, and layer‐by‐layer (LbL) complexes, as shown in (Figure ) …”

“…Various nanosized biomimetic structures have been utilized for the tissue regeneration process through cell/drug delivery, such as electrospun scaffolds, self-assembling peptides, peptide amphiphiles, and layer-bylayer (LbL) complexes, as shown in ( Figure 5). 125,126 The morphology of scaffolds is crucial in providing guidance cues for cellular regulation. The high surface area to volume ratio of nanofibers scaffolds lead to the interconnected porous networks which assist in nutrition perfusion and diffusions.…”