Heart valve disease is a serious medical condition that causes improper flow of blood in the heart and affects millions of people globally. Although over 290,000 heart valve replacement surgeries are conducted annually worldwide, current valve replacement options are hindered by significant limitations and dangerous side effects. Tissue engineered heart valves (TEHV) offer great promise in producing improved valve replacements. Consisting of a fibrous matrix repopulated with the patient’s cells, these valve replacements would be able to remodel and grow with the patient. Shear forces due to complex blood flow patterns around TEHV have been theorized to affect host cell repopulation of the decellularized engineered matrix. In vitro experiments are needed to study the effects of the flow patterns in a controlled manner, yet no high-throughput systems that allow for matrix decellularization and detailed observation of valvular cell proliferation, migration and differentiation exist. To fulfill this need, we developed a microfluidic system made up of a microfluidic chip and a gravity pump. The PDMS chip has a central chamber in which a fibroblast seeded hydrogel can be cultured, allowing it to create a cell derived matrix, and then decellularized by utilizing fluid channels parallel to the gel chamber. It was demonstrated that the decellularization process removes all cell materials below the ability to detect using fluorescent nuclear and cytoskeletal stains. We verified that the gravity pump can produce steady and oscillatory shear flow patterns relevant to healthy and diseased native heart conditions (0.2-2.0 Pa, 1 Hz). The pump consists of fluid reservoirs placed at customizable heights to allow for the ease of manipulating flow rates, and pinch valves to reverse the direction of flow in the device. Using this system, the attachment, migration, and differentiation of multiple cell types through engineered matrices can be studied to improve the design of TEHVs.

• This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

Creator

• Hertel, Sydney
• Sansoucy, Emily
• Petruzziello, Isaac
• Pitta, Miranda

Publisher

• Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Identifier

• 65091
• E-project-042822-110249

Keyword

• TEHV
• EndMT
• Tissue Engineering
• Microfluidics
• Fluid Flow
• Heart Valve

Advisor

• Billiar, Kristen

Year

• 2022

Date created

• 2022-04-28

Resource type

• Major Qualifying Project

Major

• Biomedical Engineering

Rights statement

• In Copyright