3D bioprinting platform offers realistic cardiac tissue model for drug testing
3D bioprinting platform offers realistic cardiac tissue model for drug testing lead image
In recent years, few clinical drugs have been approved to treat advanced cardiac diseases. In large part, this is due to the unique complexity of cardiac physiology and the difficulty involved in reproducing that complexity in in vitro models.
Finkel et al. employed freeform reversible embedding of suspended hydrogels (FRESH) 3D bioprinting to manufacture engineered heart tissue in a well-plate format, producing uniform tissue that exhibits realistic responses to medication.
“We are able to fabricate tissues at similar cell density found in native myocardium, control the deposition of different cardiac cell types, and make bespoke geometries designed for tissue function,” said author Andrew Lee. “The flexibility of design and the degree of tissue manufacturing control are what enable the fabrication of physiologically relevant and functionally responsive cardiac tissues.”
FRESH bioprinting involves extruding cell-laden bioinks into a gelatin support structure that provides initial mechanical support as the bioink gels. This approach allowed the team to engineer complex heart tissue containing cardiac fibroblasts and stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes and endothelial cells. In tests, their engineered tissue exhibited realistic responses to isoproterenol and verapamil, two common cardiac medications.
The authors hope to demonstrate the ability of their platform to act as a valuable in vitro model, leading to more powerful cardiac drugs and faster development times.
“Furthermore, the tunability of this model makes patient-specific or population-specific data on drug responses realistic to consider,” said Lee. “We can start thinking about tailoring cardiac tissue models to sex, age, ethnicity, and diseases, all of which have unique compositional, structural, and functional phenotypes that we can now control.”
Source: “FRESH 3D bioprinted cardiac tissue, a bioengineered platform for in-vitro pharmacology,” by Samuel Finkel, Shannon Sweet, Tyler Locke, Sydney Smith, Zhefan Wang, Christopher Sandini, John Imredy, Yufang He, Marc Durante, Armando Lagrutta, Adam Feinberg, and Andrew Lee, APL Bioengineering (2023). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0163363 .
