Over five million Americans are diagnosed with Valvular Heart Disease each year. Current Heart Valve replacements include mechanical and bioprosthetic valves, but these solutions have negative side effects. Tissue-Engineered Heart Valves are a promising solution, but there is a lack of quantitative understanding of how the cells respond to the complex mechanical environment of the valves. There are available commercial and custom-made devices used to study cellular response to stretching, but they are inaccessible and cannot simulate the high strain and strain rate conditions that cells undergo in heart valves. Therefore, we built an open-source uniaxial cell stretching device with customizable strain and frequency to be able to mimic the dynamic environment of heart valves. Cell stretching wells made out of our chosen material, polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), were designed, created, and validated through FEA Analysis and testing on both an Instron Electropuls 1000 and our device. Validation testing confirmed that our device can successfully stretch cells at 30% strain, with our wells lasting 136,800 cycles, or 24 hours at 30% strain and 1 Hz frequency. We performed an experiment on our device with rat smooth muscle cells to confirm the device's functionality.

• This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

Creator

• Cason, Gabriel
• Skende, Livia
• Elmhurst, Stuart
• Morgan, Alyssa
• Zuwallack, Angus

Publisher

• Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Identifier

• 121593
• E-project-042424-203206

Advisor

• Billiar, Kristen
• Lessing, Shana
• Faber, Brenton

Year

• 2024

Date created

• 2024-04-24

Resource type

• Major Qualifying Project

Major

• Biomedical Engineering

Source

• E-project-042424-203206

Rights statement

• In Copyright