Materiali Conduttivi per l'applicazione nell'Ingegnerizzazione del Tessuto Cardiaco

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death world-wide, the best known is myocardial infarction or “heart attack”, it can cause a myocardial necrosis. Cardiac tissue engineering is a new therapeutic approach, which relies on the idea that the infarcted area should be regenerated instead of replaced using a combination of biomaterials, cells and growth factors (scaffold). Biomaterials play a key role, in fact they have to interact with the healthy myocardial tissue and mimic the extracellular matrix behavior. Cardiac physiology is studied to identify features and properties that the biomaterials must have, while biomaterials characterization is needed to verify it they are suitable to mimic the myocardial behavior. Materials used in cardiac tissue engineering must be biocompatible, porous and should have the same size of the infarcted area, able to contract in response to an electrical stimuli and then regain their original shape and also electrically conductive to permit the propagation of the electrical stimuli. Suitable and promising materials having the above mentioned properties are carbon-based nanomaterials, gold-based nanomaterials and electroactive polymers, these materials also own several limits, the most important are low biocompatibility and cytotoxicity (they can be toxic to cells). This is the reason because natural polymeric materials such as collagen, fibrin, alginate, chitosan and gelatin, and synthetic polymeric materials such as PGA, PLA, PLGA, PEG, PCL and GelMA are been discussed. Indeed, they are often used to create hybrid scaffolds to increase the biocompatibility and to avoid or limit the cytotoxicity of the aforementioned materials. As mentioned above characterization methods are very important in cardiac tissue engineering. The characterization methods discussed in detail are: Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) to value scaffolds’ morphology, Four-point probe method to value the electrical conductivity of the scaffolds and Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) to value the cell adhesion, maturation and proliferation on scaffolds. Cardiac tissue engineering is a widely argument of research, it involves many scientific fields such as medicine, chemistry, biology, physics, engineering and materials science. The aim of this report is providing a review about the importance of materials in cardiac tissue engineering.