Highly Aligned Elastin Incorporated Collagen Fibers for Vascular Tissue Engineering

Introduction: Coronary artery disease caused by atherosclerosis is a significant health problem worldwide. In the United States alone, over 370,000 people die from the disease each year [1]. The current gold standard for the treatment of coronary artery disease is the transplantation of autologous blood vessels. However, lack of sufficient donor tissue and donor-site morbidity are major limitations [2]. While synthetic grafts are viable alternatives, occlusion and intimal hyperplasia limit their use only to large-diameter blood vessels (> 6mm). Development of a fully functional tissue-engineered vascular graft that mimics the composition, topography and mechanical properties of native blood vessel is a viable strategy for the treatment of diseased arteries. In this study, we employed an electrochemical processing methodology to synthesize elastin incorporated electrochemically aligned collagen (ELAC) fibers. We hypothesized that the elastin incorporated ELAC fibers will provide compositional and topographical cues to stimulate the orientation and contractile phenotype of rat aorta smooth muscle cells (rSMCs).