Jordan Eatough, Jeremy Struk, Andrew Priest, Brady Vance, Brielle Woolsey, Steven Balls, Camille
Brantly, Makena Ford, Brenden Herrod, and Holly Howarth, Brigham Young University
Engineering
Ischemic heart disease is the leading killer in the world; 7.4 million people died from the disease in 2012 alone. The United States contributed over 600,000 deaths to that number.The primary treatment for the disease is heart transplantation, which has two major flaws. Our goal is to help create a solution to these two problems, namely immunorejection and scarcity of donors. We will do this by creating bioartificial hearts that could be quickly and specifically grown from each patient’s cells, thus eliminating organ rejection. We also hope to overcome the problem of thrombogenesis that often occurs with bioarticial solutions. We report an economic and effective decellularization process of porcine organs with minimum damage to the cardiac extracellular matrix (cECM). DNA and histology tests were used to verify the success of decellularization. The ECM was characterized using glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) and collagen assays, as well as scanning electron microscopy (SEM). A macrophage assay was also developed to ensure non-immunogenicity of decellularized heart tissues compared to native heart tissues. Tissue castings were made to ensure that the vasculature of the heart was not damaged in the decellularization process. Our results give promise that we can create a suitable protein scaffold for recellularization. We have begun testing for large-scale recellularization, and thrombogenicity testing of the decellularized hearts. Our goal is the creation of functional human cardiac tissue grown on the scaffold of a porcine heart. Preliminary tests have shown that the ECM created by our decellularization process is not cytotoxic, and that cell growth and proliferation has been observed.