Direct cell seeding and culture on collagen-coated silicone mandrels to generate vascular tissue tubes

The large number of patients suffering from cardiovascular disease has led to a demand for functional arterial replacements. A variety of approaches to tissue engineering vascular grafts have shown promise, including seeding cells onto natural and synthetic scaffolds. Alternatively, completely cellular vascular grafts can be generated by culturing cell sheets which are subsequently rolled into a tube. The goal of this project is to develop fully biological small diameter tissue engineered tubes that can be used as vascular tissue replacements without first generating cell sheets. To achieve this aim, we seeded rat aortic smooth muscle cells onto silicone tubes coated with a thin layer of collagen gel. In a span of 14 days, cells proliferated on the mandrels to form tubes (1.2 mm inner diameter and 0.263 plusmn 0.59 mm thick; n=3). These results show that this technique enables us to develop cell tubes in a very short period of time with less manipulation than cell sheet-based approaches to generating cellular vascular grafts.