IN VITRO EVALUATION OF A PILE LOOP KNITTED SCAFFOLD FOR MYOCARDIAL TISSUE ENGINEERING USING C2C12 CELLS

Pile loop knitted scaffold has attracted attention for being used as a three dimensional (3D) biocompatible material particularly for the application of myocardial tissue engineering. In this research, nonintermingled, textured polyethylene terephthalate (PET) multifilament yarn with a filament count of 48 was used for producing a pile loop knit structure to investigate if structure could provide an appropriate microenvironment for the seeded murine C2C12 myoblasts in case of increasing in filament diameter (20.7 micron versus 9.1 micron from the previous study). The resulting structure had a pore network mainly consisting of macropores of 100-200 µm that were well interconnected with micropores (<90 µm). Furthermore, the mean values of the Young’s modulus of the structures at 20% strain were 240.67 kPa in the warp direction, and 85.73 kPa in the weft direction, which can be claimed not to be far from those declared in the literature for the human heart muscle. In addition, the cyclic loading-unloading test revealed no creep in the fabric after 100 cycles. According to the results of the WST-1 assay, the 48 filament-based scaffold was non-cytotoxic for C2C12 cells that were able to proliferate properly on the scaffold, which was visualized by SEM and confocal images. In this respect, pile loop knit structures keep promising results for being used as a cardiac patch.