Advanced multifunction 3D biofabrication for the generation of computationally modelled human-scale therapeutic cardiac tissues – CARDIOPRINT

Ischemic heart disease (IHD) is the leading single cause of death in the EU. Regenerative Medicine, Cell Therapy and cardiac Tissue Engineering (cTE) proved unsuccessful results when on big animal models or human scale. The main culprits are the lack of design and the absence of devices (printers) able to provide sufficient precision for the biofabrication of architecturally complex tissues as the myocardium. In the heart, the orientation of cardiac muscle determines not only the fundamental cycles of healthy contraction-torsion, but also establishes the required hierarchy of cardiomyocyte (CM) activation.

The main aim of CARDIOPRINT is to advance the biofabrication field by the concomitant development of a novel device capable of generating bioartificial human tissues with unprecedented precision plus the needed cardio-mimetic biomaterials and a new cardiac image-to-transplant workflow Our approach is centered on upscaling towards translation and will be uniquely based on a large animal model (pig).

CARDIOPRINT combines the latest innovations in 3D printing, biomaterials and stem cells with the capacity of Computational Modeling to provide a biomimetic and personalized design based on cardiac data.