Resumen
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- RHEART will cross boundaries to drive advances in regenerative
edicine and tissue engineering that will help accelerate the development of the bioengineered heart
of the future.
