Sufficient Tissue Engineered Heart Valves: A Question of Cell Source?

Abstract A promising approach to solve the problems of currently used heart valve prostheses, e.g. degeneration, need for anticoagulation and risk of endocarditis, is the tissue engineering of heart valves. By using patient derived cells and fibrin as a scaffold for these valves we aim at completely autologous heart valves which have the potential to grow and hence are especially interesting for valve replacement in paediatric surgery. However, a major obstacle on the way to clinical application of tissue engineered heart valves (TEHV) is the cell-mediated tissue contraction which leads to the shrinkage of the valve’s leaflets and thus to its insufficiency. Several groups tested TEHV in the pulmonary position in the sheep model and reported mild to moderate regurgitation already at a short postimplantation time. Our goal was to analyse the influence of the cell source on the sufficiency of TEHV. Different cell sources, among which ovine carotid artery (OCA) and umbilical artery (OUA), were compared on the...