Impact

Global Impact

Chamber-specific, naturally-derived ECM hydrogel scaffolds have a wide range of applications in cardiac disease modeling and therapeutics design and testing. Successful hydrogel scaffolds can be utilized to develop EHTs for physiologically-relevant disease models and can also be integrated into therapeutics. Therefore, the development of these hydrogels have a global impact on researchers, medical professionals, patients impacted by cardiovascular disease, and the general scientific community.

Clinical Relevance

We hypothesized that SDC treatment would retain a more native composition of ECM when compared to SDS, as well as have benefits for EHT production. We wanted to see that our decellularization method would strip away enough DNA to have clinical relavance, sine they must fall under the threshold of 50 ng/mg of tissue to prevent unwanted immune responses. Our hydrogels met this threshold.

Analyzing the trends, we observed higher protein loss into the supernatant during SDS decellularization. Additionally, there is no clear trend in SDC data but the overall magnitude of protein loss is less when compared to SDS. This is important in clinical development because it is optimal to maintain more of the ECM's native structure and proteins.

Future Directions and Goals:

We have developed grips and molds to generate EHT's from ECM products and we will test passive and active mechanics for each chamber and detergent method. We will perform statistical analyses and further investigate the protein release data between protocols. We also want to look at DNA content using a Pico green assay kit, and analyze GAG content in decellularized chambers.

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