(182k) A Dynamic Hydrogel Platform for Cardiac Tissue Model

Heart disease is currently the leading cause of death in the United States, and is most often caused by myocardial infarction (MI). There is a desire to create novel therapies and treatments. However, due to a lack of fundamental understanding of the heart’s inflammatory response to infarction, the development of new therapies is both time consuming and costly. In this work, we report a novel approach to fabricate a dynamic hydrogel platform which better mimics the major structural components of the heart, including stiffness, cellular alignment, conductivity, and biochemistry. Our platform also allows dynamic manipulation of stiffness (stiffening) and cellular alignment. We believe that our approach could potentially provide an alternative cardiac model to study cardiac disease as compared to both in vivo animal models and static in vitro models.