GCRIS

Cardiovascular diseases remain the primary cause of death in the modern world. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), almost 18 million people lose their lives each year due to cardiac dysfunction. Nearly 75% of the cases are related to heart attack, stroke, and heart failure. Furthermore, the limited restoration capacity of the adult cardiac tissue leads to irreversible changes in myocardial injury and ischemia, which seriously increases the mortality rates. Currently, the available therapeutic approaches for cardiovascular dysfunctions mainly depend on pharmaceutical drugs, vascular assist devices, or organ transplantations in severe cases. However, these strategies cannot prevent ischemia-related damages or restore the dysfunction of heart tissue. Besides, there are certain limitations, including donor shortage, thrombosis of the device, immune rejection reactions, and operative morbidity of the patient. Therefore, combining stem cells with outstanding hydrogels has become a critically important phenomenon in treating cardiovascular disease. Today, stem cell-based applications form the pivot point of regenerative treatments due to their differentiation and immunomodulatory capacity. However, due to low cellular retention and the inhomogeneous therapeutic activities, the effectiveness of stem cell regeneration in clinical and preclinical studies is reduced. Hence, the synergetic approaches of the injectable hydrogels with stem cells and subcellular bioactive tools may hold the promises of the next-generation therapies. Over the last decade, various functional hydrogels from natural, synthetic, or decellularized tissue precursors have been developed and investigated for cardiovascular applications. In this chapter, advances in stem cell therapy have been discussed with the latest research on functional hydrogels for cardiovascular regeneration. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023.

Gravity is an important biomechanical signal effecting the morphology and function of organisms. Reduction of gravitational forces, as experienced during spaceflight, cause alterations in the biological systems. Magnetic levitation technique is one of the most recent ground-based technology to mimic weightlessness environment. In addition to providing a platform to investigate biological effects of the weightlessness, this platform presents a novel opportunity to biofabricate 3-dimensional (3D) structures in a scaffold-and nozzle-free fashion. In this study, various controllable self-assembled 3D living structures were fabricated via magnetic levitation technique. This strategy may offer an easy and cost-effective opportunity for a wide range of space biotechnology researches.

Scopus İndeksli Yayınlar Koleksiyonu / Scopus Indexed Publications Collection

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