of Engineered Heart Valve

The ability to replicate physiological hemodynamic conditions during in vitro tissue development has been recognized as an important aspect in the development and in vitro assessment of engineered heart valve tissues. Moreover, we have demonstrated that stud-ies aiming to understand mechanical conditioning require separation of the major heart valve deformation loading modes: flow, stretch, and flexure (FSF) (Sacks et al., 2009, "Bioengineering Challenges for Heart Valve Tissue Engineering, " Annu. Rev. Biomed. Eng., 11(1), pp. 289–313). To achieve these goals in a novel bioreactor design, we uti-lized a cylindrical conduit configuration for the conditioning chamber to allow for higher fluid velocities, translating to higher shear stresses on the in situ tissue specimens while retaining laminar flow conditions. Moving boundary computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations were performed to predict the flow field under combined cyclic flexure and steady flow (cyclic-flex-flow) states using various combinations of flow rate, and media viscosity. The device was successfully constructed and tested for incubator housing, gas exchange, and sterility. In addition, we performed a pilot experiment using biodegradabl