People in Research

Elizabeth Donaldson

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Advisor: Buddy Ratner

Department/status: 3rd year Materials Science and Engineering

Project overview:
Poly(vinyl alcohol)-amino acid hydorogels coupled with colloidial gas aphron foaming techniques as a novel approach to a tissue engineered myocardial patch.

Project details:
Cardiovascular disease currently affects an estimated 58 million Americans and is the leading cause of death in the US. Tissue engineering is one approach that aims to create functional tissue using cells seeded onto 3-D scaffolds, providing an alternative to traditional transplants. Cardiac tissue engineering can take many forms, from growing patches of beating tissue in vitro to regenerative therapies for re-growing healthy tissue in situ. Despite the wide differences between approaches, they all share one common need: a scaffolding material with properties mimicking natural heart tissue. Tissue engineering techniques in general require the use of porous scaffolds, which serve as a 3-D template for initial cell attachment and growth leading to tissue formation. An ideal tissue scaffold must meet several requirements: the scaffold must comprise an interconnected, open pore network with mechanical properties closely matching those of the tissues at the site of implantation and have a surface chemistry suitable for cell attachment, proliferation and differentiation. Our research presents a novel approach to meet these design requirements. Specifically, the research aims to test the hypothesis that a material suitable for use as a myocardial scaffold can be created using poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) based hydrogels containing only FDA approved reagents coupled with fabrication conditions mild enough for protein incorporation without inactivation. To test this hypothesis our research has three specific aims:
Aim 1: produce a highly porous scaffold using a novel fabrication technique, colloidal gas aphrons, coupled with a unique material discovered by our lab, poly(vinyl alcohol)-amino hydrogels, and characterize the final scaffold with respect to chemistry, porosity, hydrolytic permeability and hydrolytic degradation.
Aim 2: evaluate the mechanical properties of the PVA-AA scaffolds and compare to human myocardium.
Aim 3: evaluate scaffold biocompatibility using in vitro cell culture studies to evaluate long term cell viablility and differentiation and a mouse femoris bicep model to examine the in vivo response elicited by the scaffold materials.

Skills:
HPLC (high pressure liquid chromatography) techniques in conjunction with Radioflow (using tritium tagged samples), Fluorescence and UV-VIS detectors, GPC, DSC, TGA, DMA, cell culture techniques, brightfield and fluorescent microscopy, SEM, NMR, FTIR, UV-VIS absorption spectroscopy, FTIR, x-ray defraction, liquid scintillation, GC and Mass Spectrometry

Relevant honors or funding:
Project is part of the NIH funded Bioengineered Autologous Tissue (BEAT) initiative (grant #R24HL64387)

Names of others on the project:
BEAT Project