electrospun acellular heart ecm for cardiac tissue engineering

Electrospun nanofiber is one of the promising alternatives for use in tissue engineering and drug delivery due to its controllable characteristics# however, choosing an appropriate biomaterial for a specific tissue regeneration plays a significant role in fabricating functional tissue-engineered constructs# in this study, acellular calf heart extracellular matrix (ecm) has been investigated as a potential biomaterial to be electrospun for cardiac tissue engineering# the acellular calf heart was electrospun in combination with poly vinyl pyrrolidone (pvp), gelatin (gel) and polycaprolactone (pcl)# the obtained fibers were aligned, uniform, and bead free# after fabrication, the scaffolds were cross-linked in glutaraldehyde vapor to become mechanically stronger and dissoluble in the aqueous environments# considering surface topography, biocompatibility, and hydrophilicity, the fabricated hybrid electrospun ecm/pvp fibers can be proposed as a biomimetic scaffold for heart tissue engineering applications#