title: Design of custom-shaped vascularized tissues using microtissue spheroids as minimal building units.
abstract: Tissue engineering strategies are gathering clinical momentum in regenerative medicine and are expected to provide excellent opportunities for therapy for difficult-to-treat human pathologies. Being aware of the requirement to produce larger artificial tissue implants for clinical applications, we used microtissues, produced using gravity-enforced self-assembly of monodispersed primary cells, as minimal tissue units to generate scaffold-free vascularized artificial macrotissues in custom-shaped agarose molds. Mouse myoblast, pig and human articular-derived chondrocytes, and human myofibroblast (HMF)-composed microtissues (microm3 scale) were amalgamated to form coherent macrotissue patches (mm3 scale) of a desired shape. Macrotissues, assembled from the human umbilical vein endothelial cell (HUVEC)-coated HMF microtissues, developed a vascular system, which functionally connected to the chicken embryo's vasculature after implantation. The design of scaffold-free vascularized macrotissues is a first step toward the scale-up and production of artificial tissue implants for future tissue engineering initiatives.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Chemical and Bio-Engineering, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Jens M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Kelm
authors.forename: Valentin
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Djonov
authors.forename: Lars M
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Ittner
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Fluri
authors.forename: Walter
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Born
authors.forename: Simon P
authors.initials: SP
authors.lastname: Hoerstrup
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fussenegger
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002478:Cells, Cultured; D002642:Chick Embryo; D019902:Chondrocytes; D005347:Fibroblasts; D006801:Humans; D018919:Neovascularization, Physiologic; D018874:Spheroids, Cellular; D013552:Swine; D023822:Tissue Engineering