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Conductive Gel Polymers as an Extracellular Matrix Mimic and Cell Vehicle for Cardiac Tissue Engineering
Author(s) -
Maldonado Marcos A,
Bonham Andrew J
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.31.1_supplement.925.1
Subject(s) - tissue engineering , extracellular matrix , nanotechnology , materials science , induced pluripotent stem cell , biomedical engineering , conductive polymer , polymer , chemistry , embryonic stem cell , biochemistry , medicine , gene , composite material
Cardiomyopathies, diseases of the heart, are one of the major causes of death in the United States, and thus research into preventing and treating these complications is imperative. To do this, further improvements in culturing human tissues/tissue‐derived cells and development of new techniques in tissue engineering are needed, particularly in finding a suitable extracellular environment in which cardiac cells such as cardiomyocytes can be developed and maintained. As such, a great deal of effort has gone into producing polymer mimics of the natural cell environment in properties such as binding sites, stiffness, reactivity, and hydration. Here, we present work on the facile fabrication of high purity gold nanorods with carboxylate functionalization to aid in the development and characterization of conductive polymer scaffolds for cardiac tissue support. Such conductive polymers have been shown to have key roles in properly accommodating the needs of cardiac cells to build functional cardiac tissue constructs and further improve cell retention, spreading, homogenous distribution of cardiac specific markers, cell‐cell coupling and synchronized beating behavior at tissue level. We illustrate high purity gold nanorod synthesis and purification that yields high aspect ratio (> 10:1), stable gold nanorods. These were crosslinked into functional polyethylene glycol‐based scaffolds for cardiomyocyte differentiation from human induced pluripotent stem cells. This conductive extracellular matrix mimic shows great promise in improvement in control of cellular differentiation for cardiac tissue engineering. Support or Funding Information Support for this work was provided by the Metropolitan State University of Denver Provost's and LAS Dean's offices.