A TISSUE-ENGINEERED PLANT SCAFFOLD: BIOLOGICAL, MECHANICAL AND HISTOLOGICAL CHARACTERIZATION

AIASSA LUDMILA; NIEVA EDUARDO; CID, MARIANA PAULA; COMIN ROMINA; NANCY ALICIA SALVATIERRA

Congreso; XXIV CONGRESO ARGENTINO DE BIOINGENIERÍA Y XII JORNADAS DE INGENIERÍA CLÍNICA; 2023

Despite significant improvements in the creation of tissue engineering scaffolds, The greatest challenge still is developing an efficient way to deliver nutrients and oxygen. The lack of availability of organs and the high costs of obtaining them have also led science to look for solutions of different origin. The similarities in the vascular structure of plant and animal tissues allowed us to think about the development of a decellularized plant tissue as a prevascularized scaffold for tissue engineering applications. We propose in this project to implement a methodology for obtaining acellular scaffolds from baby spinach leaves in order to provide different geometries of scaffolds with intact vascularization that can serve as a foundation for subsequent recellularization with adult or embryonic animal and/or human cells. Results show that the decellularization protocol allowed to obtain a scaffold with a conserved structure, with minimal contents of nucleic acids, residual detergents and without evidence of cytotoxicity. In addition to this, the methodology developed for the decellularization of baby spinach leaves, proved to be the most efficient way of obtaining a plant based three-dimensional architecture, which could be recellularized with animal cells or stem cells in a subsequent step.