Prevalent in the US and worldwide, acute myocardial infarctions (AMI) can cause ischemic injuries to the heart that persist and lead to progressive degradation of the organ. Tissue engineering techniques exploiting biomaterials present a hopeful means of treating these injuries, either by mechanically stabilizing the injured ventricle, or by fostering cell growth to replace myocytes lost to damage.

This thesis describes the development and testing of a synthetic extracellular matrix for cardiac tissue engineering applications. The first stage of this process was using an advanced finite element model of an injured ovine left ventricle to evaluate the potential benefits of injecting synthetic materials into the heart. These simulations indicated that addition of small amounts non-contractile material (on the order of 1 - 5% total wall volume) to infarct border zone regions reduced pathological systolic fiber stress to levels near those found in normal remote regions. Simulations also determined that direct addition to the infarct itself caused increases in ventricle ejection fraction while the underlying performance of the pump, ascertained by the Starling relation, was not improved.

From these theoretical results, biomaterials were developed specifically for injection into the injured myocardium, and were characterized and tested for their mechanical properties and ability to sustain the proliferation of a stem cell population suitable for transplantation. Thermoresponsive synthetic copolymer hydrogels consisting of N-isopropylacrylamide and acrylic acid, p(NIPAAm-coAAc), crosslinked with protease degradable amino acid sequences and modified with integrin binding ligands were synthesized, characterized in vitro, and used for myocardial implantation. These injectable materials could maintain a population of bone marrow derived mesenchymal stem cells in both two dimensional and three dimensional culture, and when tested in vivo in a murine infarct model they stabilized injured ventricles, reducing functional loss over 6 weeks, and promoted the survival of transplanted stem cells.

In addition, modifications to the hydrogel to impart novel bioactivity through a developed tethered form of the protein sonic hedgehog were synthesized and characterized. This tethered form increased protein potency, induced angiogenesis, and could be incorporated into the hydrogel material for future implantation studies in the injured ventricle.