Effect of Physiologic Oscillatory Fluid Shear Stress on Engineered Heart Valve Tissue Formation.

It was previously demonstrated that combined flexure and flow in vitro conditioning augments engineered heart valve tissue formation using bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) seeded on polyglycolic acid (PGA)/poly-L-lactic acid (PLLA) blend nonwoven fibrous scaffolds (Engelmayr, et al., Biomaterials 2006; vol. 27 pp. 6083-95). Additionally, seeded scaffolds incorporated into a tissue engineered valve construct experienced significant increases in tissue formation rates with media supplementation (basic fibroblast growth factor [bFGF] and ascorbic acid-2-phosphate [AA2P]) and dynamic conditioning approximating pulmonary valve levels (Ramaswamy, et al., Biomaterials 2010; vol. 31…