Computationally and experimentallY BioEngineeRing the next generation of Growing HEARTs

ongoing

Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) results when the heart abnormally develops before birth. With diminished cardiac function, the heart fails to supply the required oxygenated blood to the body, causing a cascade of failures at different scales that prevent the newborn from growing normally. Even with improved surgical and medical treatments, CHD remains a lifelong risk factor for many diseases. An emerging application in cardiac tissue engineering is the 3D bioprinting of human hearts, or their parts, for clinical transplantation, with CHD representing a potential therapeutic target. Whereas the fabrication of bioartificial hearts is currently feasible, there remain significant scientific and technological challenges that yet need to be overcome. The development of novel experimental approaches is fundamental. At the same time, there is a pressing need for complementary computational methods to efficiently assist in the design of biophysically feasible and printable hearts, which must necessarily grow with the CHD patient's body while adapting to lifelong changes in hemodynamic conditions. In this project, therefore, I will develop a highly novel and interrelated experimental and computational approach for reproducing and predicting growing conditions of bioengineered hearts. The ambitious experimental design will enhance the maturation of cardiac muscle and biomechanical function of bioprinted ventricles in dynamic bioreactors. The highly-coupled multi-physics computational platform will describe these complex processes under multiple stimulated conditions to, ultimately, predict the critical adaptation and evolution of bioengineered ventricles potentially implanted in CHD patients. Therefore, by integrating ground-breaking methods within an extremely complex scenario, G-CYBERHEART will cross boundaries to drive advances in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering that will help accelerate the development of the bioengineered heart of the future.