Graduate Seminar - Chiara Ghezzi, PhD Candidate

Dense collagen construct as a tubular tissue model

Due to the intrinsic complexity of tissues and organs, only planar tissues have achieved clinical applications in tissue engineering. In contrast, tissue engineered tubular constructs present a complex geometry and architecture, limiting the accomplishment of suitable substitutes. Type I collagen is an optimal candidate for scaffolding due to the high biocompatibility and processability. However, collagen based hydrogels exhibit unstable geometrical properties, due to cell-mediated contraction, and low mechanical properties, requiring additional modifications. Plastic compression (PC) technique rapidly produces dense collagen constructs with fibrillar densities equivalent to native tissue. In this study, by application of PC a tubular dense collagen construct was developed and characterized, and the effect of different collagen densities and diverse collagen sources were investigated. Moreover, the dense tubular construct was seeded with primary airway smooth muscle cells extracted and cell viability, alignment, proteins expression and scaffold morphology were studied under static and dynamic culture conditions.