Date of Graduation
5-2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering
Degree Level
Undergraduate
Department
Biomedical Engineering
Advisor/Mentor
Richardson, William
Abstract
Cardiovascular diseases have been the leading cause of death for years. This includes myocardial infarctions (MI) where blood flow to the myocardium is restricted. This causes damage to cardiac muscle due to insufficient oxygen. There are multiple ways to treat patients following an MI with the most common involving assorted medication. However, there are limited medications that can be used for treating patients following MIs, and the FDA’s decreasing approval rate for new cardiac drugs will not dramatically improve the range of options. The lead-up to drug candidate rejection by the FDA can involve drugs exhibiting promising preliminary research that does not show the same effects in-vivo. A possible way to improve this area of testing is by using engineered tissues (ETs) which exhibit greater physiological relevance. One common base material used for ET applications is fibrinogen which is combined with thrombin to form fibrin gel cultures with embedded cellular populations. A difficulty with using ETs is finding the right fabrication conditions. This study focuses on two factors that impact fibrin-based ET functionality, uniformity, and compatibility with tracing software that analyzes tissue morphology. The primary factors are cell concentration and protein concentration. Experimental groups with a higher protein concentration performed the best with the tracing software. Groups with higher cell concentrations compacted uniformly and effectively following mechanical release. These results present a first step towards optimizing physiologically relevant ETs for in-vitro studies. However, there still is much to investigate when it comes to the long-term stability and validity testing of in-vitro models for clinical applications.
Keywords
fibrin gels, fibroblast, morphology, engineered tissues
Citation
Caffin, C. (2024). Evaluating Tissue Morphology in the Context of Varied Initial Fabrication Conditions. Biomedical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/bmeguht/147