Paper BI-TuA1
Simultaneous Deposition of Endothelial Cells and Biomaterials for Human Microvasculature Fabrication

Tuesday, October 16, 2007, 1:40 pm, Room 609

The current tissue engineering paradigm is that successfully engineered thick tissues must include vasculature. As biological approaches alone such as VGEF have fallen short of their promises, one may look for an engineering approach to build microvasculature. Layer-by-layer approach for customized fabrication of cell/scaffold constructs have shown some potential in building complex 3D structures. With the advent of cell printing, one may be able to build precise human microvasculature with suitable bioink. Human Microvascular Endothelial Cells (HMEC) and fibrin were studied as bioink for microvasculature construction. Endothelial cells are the only cells to compose the human capillaries and also the major cells of blood vessel intima layer. Fibrin has been already widely recognized as tissue engineering scaffold for vasculature and other cells, including skeleton/smooth muscle cells and chondrocytes. In our study, we precisely fabricated micron-sized fibrin channels using a drop-on-demand polymerization. This printing technique uses aqueous processes that have been shown to induce little, if any, damage to cells. When printing HMEC cells in conjunction with the fibrin, we found the cells aligned themselves inside the channels and proliferated to form confluent linings. Current studies to characterize the biology and functionality of these engineered microvascular structures will be presented. The preliminary data suggests that a combined simultaneous cell and scaffold printing can promote HMEC proliferation and microvasculature formation.