Point-of-Care Rapid-Seeding Ventricular Assist Device with Blood-Derived Endothelial Cells to Create a Living Antithrombotic Coating.

The most promising alternatives to heart transplantation are left ventricular assist devices and artificial hearts; however, their use has been limited by thrombotic complications. To reduce these, sintered titanium (Ti) surfaces were developed, but thrombosis still occurs in approximately 7.5% of patients.

Increased yield of endothelial cells from peripheral blood for cell therapies and tissue engineering.

Aim: Peripheral blood-derived endothelial cells (pBD-ECs) are an attractive tool for cell therapies and tissue engineering, but have been limited by their low isolation yield. We increase pBD-EC yield via administration of the chemokine receptor type 4 antagonist AMD3100, as well as via a diluted whole blood incubation (DWBI).

Materials & Methods: Porcine pBD-ECs were isolated using AMD3100 and DWBI and tested for EC markers, acetylated LDL uptake, growth kinetics, metabolic activity, flow-mediated nitric oxide production and seeded onto titanium tubes implanted into vessels of pigs.

Isolation of functional human endothelial cells from small volumes of umbilical cord blood.

Endothelial cells (ECs) isolated from endothelial progenitor cells in blood have great potential as a therapeutic tool to promote vasculogenesis and angiogenesis and treat cardiovascular diseases. However, current methods to isolate ECs are limited by a low yield with few colonies appearing during isolation. In order to utilize blood-derived ECs for therapeutic applications, a simple method is needed that can produce a high yield of ECs from small volumes of blood without the addition of animal-derived products.

Parallel-plate flow chamber and continuous flow circuit to evaluate endothelial progenitor cells under laminar flow shear stress.

The overall goal of this method is to describe a technique to subject adherent cells to laminar flow conditions and evaluate their response to well quantifiable fluid shear stresses. Our flow chamber design and flow circuit (Fig. 1) contains a transparent viewing region that enables testing of cell adhesion and imaging of cell morphology immediately before flow (Fig.