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Show 16 Asad Rauf college of engineering The goal of this research project was to create a perfused tissue model which could mimic the changes in bulk properties of cardiac tissue in response to the application of certain therapeutic treatments. This tis-sue model consisted of a synthetic substrate and a perfusion bioreactor system. The perfusion bioreactor is required to provide adequate nutrients and oxygen to thick cellular constructs, which is one of the main hurdles in creating acceptable tissue models. After design and construction of the substrate and bioreac-tor, the ability of the model to predict changes in bulk properties was evaluated experimentally. In order to perfuse media through the substrate, a culture chamber was used to constrain the scaffold. The chamber was connected to a reservoir and syringe pump used to perfuse the media through the system and a computer program was used to control media perfusion through the scaffold. The ability of our model to predict bulk changes in tissue constructs was evaluated using the signaling protein, Transform-ing Growth Factor (TGF-β). While the release of TGF-β in vivo has numerous implications, one noteworthy change is a local increase in stiffness of tissue. To test the feasibility of our model, fibroblast cell-substrates were cultured with TGF-β, and the change in stiffness was compared with acellular & TGF-β negative controls. This required us to determine cell distribution to image the cell-substrates following the culture period. Cell imaging was carried out using DAPI stain and fluorescence microscopy (Fig-2). Tensile testing was carried out to determine elastic moduli of samples. The results indicated that our model was able to detect a significant increase in stiffness of the cells cultured with TGF-β (Fig-3). CREATING AN EFFECTIVE PERFUSED TISSUE MODEL FOR EVALUATION OF CHANGES IN BULK PROPERTIES Asad Rauf (Robert Hitchcock) Department of Bioengineering University of Utah UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH ABSTRACTS Robert Hitchcock |
