New approaches that expand the current treatment options of medical management, corrective surgery, and transplantation are needed. One possibility is tissue engineering of cardiac implants. The group focused its early efforts on studying the conditions needed to grow bioreactor-derived tissue constructs on a variety of surfaces like plastics, synthetic polymers, and naturally occurring proteins. These early efforts were very fruitful and demonstrated that the NASA bioreactors were desirable vessels for cardiac tissue engineering. The beating of isolated cardiac cells had been described many years earlier, and the culture of cardiac cells in three dimensions was well known long before the term tissue-engineering was coined.
Spontaneous contraction is characteristic of cells isolated from very young animals.
There were surprises to be found in the architecture of what the team was growing, and when they looked at the micro-organization of their constructs, they found structure that was indistinguishable from the intact tissue. The research group believes that it may be possible to harness this organizational ability to grow individually designed heart implants or even an entire transplantable organ. Dr. Akins is quick to point out that there is an enormous amount of research to be carried out before cardiac tissue engineering can be applied in a surgical setting. Clearly, bringing cardiac tissue engineering to the clinical setting will take a large amount of work in a large number of labs, but Dr. Akins is optimistic. The group is beginning to dissect the steps by which cells form tissue architectures outside the body.