Intentional positioning of cells in a decellularized heart

Statement of Purpose: To address the persistent shortage of patient-matched hearts, the biomedical research community has aggressively pursued the removal of cells from unmatched hearts and the repopulation of the extracellular matrix with patient derived cells. In these strategies, heart geometry is preserved, immunogenic materials are eliminated, and functional autologous cells are returned to the heart. These new structures suffer from arrhythmia that is attributed to low density of cells, non-physiological arrangement of heart cells, and minimal diversity of cells in the tissue. There are no methods to accurately control the location or density of a given cell population during recellularization, making a full reconstruction of a functioning heart impossible. To solve this problem, we use binding motifs on the cell surface and on targeted locations in the heart scaffold to specifically load cells at their physiological location. Thus, we report targeted cell adhesion enables intentional positioning of multiple cell populations and higher tissue density with single-cell resolution in a decellularized heart.