Superaligned Carbon Nanotubes Guide Oriented Cell Growth and Promote Electrophysiological Homogeneity for Synthetic Cardiac Tissues

Abstract

Cardiac engineering of patches and tissues is a promising option to restore infarcted hearts, by seeding cardiac cells onto scaffolds and nurturing their growth in vitro. However, current patches fail to fully imitate the hierarchically aligned structure in the natural myocardium, the fast electrotonic propagation, and the subsequent synchronized contractions. Here, superaligned carbon-nanotube sheets (SA-CNTs) are explored to culture cardiomyocytes, mimicking the aligned structure and electrical-impulse transmission behavior of the natural myocardium. The SA-CNTs not only induce an elongated and aligned cell morphology of cultured cardiomyocytes, but also provide efficient extracellular signal-transmission pathways required for regular and synchronous cell contractions. Furthermore, the SA-CNTs can reduce the beat-to-beat and cell-to-cell dispersion in repolarization of cultured cells, which is essential for a normal beating rhythm, and potentially reduce the occurrence of arrhythmias. Finally, SA-CNT-based flexible one-piece electrodes demonstrate a multipoint pacing function. These combined high properties make SA-CNTs promising in applications in cardiac resynchronization therapy in patients with heart failure and following myocardial infarctions.

Cell-derived extracellular matrix-coated silk fibroin scaffold for cardiogenesis of brown adipose stem cells through modulation of TGF-β pathway

“…Cardial tissue engineering has developed rapidly in recent years, and engineered cardiac tissues (ECTs) have been constructed in vitro based on different scaffold guided by various construction strategies [ 1–3 ]. Scaffold as a part of myocardial tissue engineering play important roles in myocardial remodeling.…”

A Reactive Oxygen Species Scavenging and O2 Generating Injectable Hydrogel for Myocardial Infarction Treatment In vivo

“…The use of stem cells faces several limitations such as low cell retention, timeconsuming of cell preparation, and potential allogeneic immune response, etc. [4] By contrast, the use of regenerative biomaterials can avoid these limitations, while the therapeutic performance can be well manipulated by using patches, [5] hydrogels, [6] scaffolds, [7] or particles. [8] In particular, the injectable hydrogels have the advantages of easy surgical operation and direct injection into the infarcted area, [9] leading to the most effective therapeutic effect on MI and restoration of the myocardial functions.…”

Multifunctional Fibers to Shape Future Biomedical Devices

“…In addition to electrical and mechanical properties, biocompatibility is also an important character of CNT fibers. It was reported that short length CNTs might penetrate into living cells to interfere intracellular, whereas the CNTs in the aligned CNT fibers were hundreds of micrometers in length and assembled into aligned bundles, which were less likely to pierce through cells . In vitro experiments have shown that aligned CNTs did not trigger significant cytotoxicity for cell culturing .…”