Scaffold bioprocessing for endogenous cardiovascular tissue restoration

About this Research Topic

Background

As the field of cardiovascular tissue engineering and regenerative medicine keeps expanding its domain to a broader spectrum of clinical applications, only a limited number of medical devices with the ability to induce endogenous tissue restoration have reached the market and are now clinically available. Advanced material bioprocessing technologies, including additive manufacturing, and their increased capacity to control scaffold structure-function across the scales, play and will play a stronger role in accelerating translation. Improved control of biomaterials and engineered construct structure-function enables complex scaffold design paradigms to be challenged and evaluated. Scaffold structural and functional biomimicry, for instance, can now be implemented with an unprecedented level of realism at the organ and tissue scales.

Despite the broadly recognized value of cardiovascular tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, the field has not yet met success in translating the notion of endogenous tissue restoration from academia to the bedside. This is generally attributed to the persistence of major gaps in knowledge regarding the complex phenomena regulating material-driven host cell recruitment, tissue formation, elaboration, and complete maturation. The continuous advancement of additive manufacturing as well as fibrous material processing technologies such as electrospinning, melt electro writing, and jet-spinning enables the engineering of tissue and organ surrogates with increased control on scaffold micro-meso architecture, macro morphology, and their related function. This platform, if well developed, has the potential to provide powerful tools to gain a mechanistic understanding of the relationship between scaffold structure-function, and endogenous tissue growth. The better this fundamental, basic science question is addressed the sooner translation will happen.

The scope of this special issue is to collect and showcase the most promising bioprocessing technologies for the engineering of cardiovascular tissue surrogates and for advanced regenerative medicine therapies that are addressing unmet clinical needs in cardiovascular diseases. The editors are welcoming original research articles and reviews that cover emerging strategies for scaffold processing with emphasis on the impact of the engineered construct architecture on endogenous cardiovascular tissue elaboration in vitro and in vivo.

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Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Data Report
• Editorial
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Addittive manufacturing, bioprocessing, cardiovascular tissue engineering, biomimicry, endogenous tissue restoration.

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