3-D tissue imaged using 3-D fluorescent imaging, where many cells laid down sequentially to make attached layers of alternating cell types like membranes in the human body.
At the York University in Toronto, Canada researchers have come up with a way of integrating three different cardiac cell types into a single functional, 3D beating tissue. Unlike many other tissue engineering techniques, the York team didn’t use any scaffolding to hold the cells in place. The cells, which were contractile myocardial cells, connective tissue cells, and vascular cells, were stuck together using a material called ViaGlue from OrganoLinX, a new biotech firm that’s yet to publish a website.
The ViaGlue allows the cells to be packed tightly together, since the heart is quite dense and the electric pacing has to synchronize across all the cells. “Making in vitro 3D cardiac tissue has long presented a challenge to scientists because of the high density of cells and muscularity of the heart,” said Dmitry Rogozhnikov, a chemistry PhD student at York. “For 2D or 3D cardiac tissue to be functional it needs the same high cellular density and the cells must be in contact to facilitate synchronized beating.”
From the study abstract in Scientific Reports:
[W]e develop a programmed rapid self-assembly strategy to induce specific and stable cell-cell contacts among multiple cell types found in heart tissue to generate 3D tissues through cell-surface engineering based on liposome delivery and fusion to display bio-orthogonal functional groups from cell membranes. We generate, for the first time, a scaffold free and stable self assembled 3 cell line co-culture 3D cardiac tissue model by assembling cardiomyocytes, endothelial cells and cardiac fibroblast cells via a rapid inter-cell click ligation process.
Study in journal Scientific Reports: Scaffold Free Bio-orthogonal Assembly of 3-Dimensional Cardiac Tissue via Cell Surface Engineering…
Via: York University…
