BACKGROUND:In recent years, a lot of studies have reported the feasibility and efficacy of transplanting seed celsvia tissue-engineered cardiac patches into specific infarcted myocardial area, helping regeneration of damaged heart tissue and improving heart functions.
OBJECTIVE:To review the methods and strategies of fabricating tissue-engineered cardiac patches and to analyze the structure and functional characteristics of cardiac patches prepared by different methods.
METHODS: The first author retrieved relevant articles about the fabrication methods of tissue engineered cardiac patches by searching PubMed and Web of science data bases. The key words were “cardiac infarction, cel death”.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION:The fabrication methods and strategies of tissue-engineered cardiac patches are as folows: (1) obtaining multi-layer cel sheets by overlapping monolayer cel sheets; (2) combing gelatin with cels to construct multi-layer cel sheets; (3) seeding cels on scaffolds; (4) homogeneous arrangement of cels. Recent studies about tissue-engineered cardiac patches have demonstrated that the biological activities of seed cels, such as retention, survival and paracrine effects, greatly influence the effect of cardiac patches on the repair and regeneration of infarcted myocardial tissues. Temperature-sensitive method is the most mature and wide-spread used constructing technique; besides, other strategies also successfuly improve the biological activities of seed cels to different extents, and they also increase the mechanical strength and thickness of cel sheets in order to have better operability. Tissue-engineered cardiac patches are usualy prepared by different combined strategies on purpose to obtain better biological and mechanical properties.