The development and evaluation of a contractile, hydrogel scaffold for skeletal muscle tissue engineering

Skeletal muscle tissue has the ability to regenerate and return function to the damaged areas following an incident that has resulted in muscle loss or injury. However, in severe injuries with large volumetric deficiencies, body’s natural healing mechanisms fall short and require artificial interventions. There currently exist surgical treatments such as muscle flaps to promote healing and help damaged skeletal muscle tissue to return to their functional state. However, such treatments have significant drawbacks and often lead to a lowered quality life for patients. The field of tissue engineering has demonstrated preliminary advances through the use of three-dimensional scaffolds as a solution to develop a personalized treatment for volumetric muscle loss. Despite such advances in this field, there remains an abundant of hurdles before scaffolds can become widely used in clinical setting. Recently tissue engineers have been successful to design skeletal muscle scaffolds that led to the fusion of myoblasts into myotubes, however, the lack of electrical and mechanical stimuli similar to the native tissue can prevent the formation of functional muscle. The overall goal of this research project is to develop polymeric scaffolds to deliver the necessary stimuli to form functional skeletal muscles. Herein, Poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEGDA) has been copolymerized with MAETAC to form an electroactive polymer, that can change size or shape as a response to an electric field, has been combined with PEDOT:PSS to develop a skeletal muscle tissue engineering scaffold. To that end, this project has the following aims: 1) Characterize and optimize a positively charged poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate based hydrogel as an actuating muscle tissue engineering scaffold; 2) Develop and optimize an electroconductive self-actuating multilayer scaffold for skeletal muscle tissue engineering.M.S.Includes bibliographical reference