The creation of musculoskeletal tissue represents an alternative for the replacement of soft tissue in reconstructive surgery. However, most of the approaches of creating artificial tissue have their limitations in the size as the maximally obtainable dimension of bioartificial tissue (BAT) is limited due to the lack of supporting vessels within the 3-dimensional construct. The seeded myoblasts require high amounts of perfusion, oxygen, and nutrients to survive. To achieve this, we developed a 3-dimensional scaffold which features the epigastric artery as macroscopic core vessel inside the BAT in a rat model (perfused group, ) and a control group ( ) without the epigastric vessels and, therefore, without perfusion. The in vivo monitoring of the transplanted myoblasts was assessed by bioluminescence imaging and showed both the viability of the epigastric artery within the 3-dimensional construct and again that cell survival in vivo is highly depending on the blood supply with the beginning of capillarization within the BAT seven days after transplantation in the perfused group. However, further studies focussing on the matrix improvement will be necessary to create a transplantable BAT with the epigastric artery as anastomosable vessel. 1. Introduction The replacement and reconstruction of musculoskeletal tissue after severe damage caused by traumatic injury, tumor surgery, or prolonged denervation is limited with the utilizable number of transplantable muscle tissue. Moreover, the transfer of muscle tissue is not uncommonly associated with aesthetic and functional impairment at the donor site. Thus, musculoskeletal tissue engineering is attempting to be an alternative in the challenging field of reconstructive surgery [1–5]. However, during the last decade of stem cell and tissue engineering research, it turned out that one main critical factor in tissue engineering is the lack of supporting blood vessels and insufficient capillarization [6, 7]. Therefore different in vivo models like the AV-loop using the femoral vessels have been developed and confirmed a much higher cell survival by inducing vascularisation of the used matrix and furthermore the possibility to create a 3D-bioartificial tissue construct [8–14]. In this study, we established a new in vivo model of musculoskeletal tissue engineering using the inferior and superior epigastric artery as central-core vessels of our custom-made implantable bioreactor chamber. In order to follow-up our transplanted myoblasts in vivo, the cells have been transfected with Luciferase and could in this way be
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