A Perfusion Protocol for the Porcine Heart Decelularization with Application in Tissue Engineering

The allogenic or xenogenic organs such as the heart, liver, lung or kidney could be a convenient sours of biocompatible scaffolds for autologous cell seeding in order to obtaining the new organs, immunologically compatible to suffering patients. Comparing to the biomimetic scaffolds, obtaining through macromolecular chemistry procedures, decellularization of tissues or organs provide an increased fidelity of architecture and chemical composition of the cell microenvironment, as well a highly similarity of anatomical structure, including the existence of the network of blood vessels, which is still a big challenge for tissue engineering. This paper is a preliminary work that set a perfusion protocol for porcine heart decelularization. As result of combined action of enzimatic, detergent and clearance agents, a decellularized heart with a slightly modified porosity of the extracellular matrix has been achieved.