Electrospun Natural Proteins for Cardiac Tissue Engineering

Abstract

Myocardial Infarction leads to end-stage heart failure and it is the major cause of death in many industrialized nations. Tissue engineering approaches for treatment of the infarcted tissue has gained huge attention over the recent years and research in this direction mainly aims for the optimization of a biomaterial scaffold with cell-source for tissue regeneration. In this regard, we fabricated absolutely natural polymeric composite scaffolds, using the blood protein, namely fibrinogen, the denatured collagen glycoprotein gelatin and collagen by electrospinning process. Scaffolds with different weight ratios of fibrinogen:gelatin (Fib:Gel) and Fibrinogen:Collagen (Fib:Coll) was prepared and cross-linking (CL) of the electrospun scaffolds was carried out using glutaraldehyde vapors to improve their mechanical properties. The fiber diameters of the fabricated scaffolds were in the range of 150 ? 300 nm which was close to the size of the native protein fibers in the myocardial extracellular matrix. Tensile properties & stiffness values of the matrices were found to be much similar to the innate properties of the native myocardium. Cell culture studies using human cardiomyocytes revealed significant increase in cell proliferation on the Fib/Gel matrices compared to pure fibrinogen scaffolds. Moreover, dual immunefluorescent analysis proved that the fabricated Fib/Coll substrates enhanced the cardiomyogenic differentiation of human adipose-derived stem cells thereby establishing these scaffolds as promising substrates for regeneration of the infarcted myocardium.