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Abstract A heart attack results in the permanent loss of heart muscle and can lead to heart disease, which kills more than 7 million people worldwide each year. To date, outside of heart transplantation, current clinical treatments cannot regenerate lost heart muscle or restore full function to the damaged heart. There is a critical need to create engineered heart tissues with structural complexity and functional capacity needed to replace damaged heart muscle. The inextricable link between structure and function suggests that hydrogel composites hold tremendous promise as a biomaterial‐guided strategy to advance heart muscle tissue engineering. Such composites provide biophysical cues and functionality as a provisional extracellular matrix that hydrogels cannot on their own. This review describes the latest advances in the characterization of these biomaterial systems and using them for heart muscle tissue engineering. The review integrates results across the field to provide new insights on critical features within hydrogel composites and perspectives on the next steps to harnessing these promising biomaterials to faithfully reproduce the complex structure and function of native heart muscle.
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Developing a Synthetic Hydrogel for Breast Tissue Engineering
As part of the PI's outreach, a course-based undergraduate research experience engaged undergraduate women in research from examining the literature to identify a gap, formulating a research hypothesis, designing experiments to test the hypothesis, analyzing the data, writing and submitting an abstract and presenting the research to the scientific community. This project was as follows: Current clinical approaches to repair breast damage from cancer resection, injury, or deformity focus on synthetic implants or autologous muscle grafts. While there are drawbacks and benefits to each, neither restore the function lost should the woman desire to nurse children. Tissue engineering methods have the potential to restore breast tissue volume and function that circumvent the reconstructive limitations of contemporary surgical procedures. There is a large body of research on breast tissue engineering; however, much of the research focuses on restoring breast volume rather than breast function and seek to replace the missing tissue with fat or muscle. Here, we aim to develop a scaffold capable of supporting both breast adipose and glandular tissue (the main components of breast tissue) towards restoring both form and function to the breast.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1752079
- PAR ID:
- 10139168
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Biomedical Engineering Society
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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- The DOI is not currently available.
