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Fibrin-Based Engineered Vascular Tissues As Platforms For Cellular Studies And Disease Modeling, Khalil Dayekh

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Vascular tissue engineering (VTE) is an emerging alternative therapeutic intervention strategy to treat diseases such as atherosclerosis. While the ultimate goal of VTE is designing tissues to serve as graft substitutes, they can also serve as powerful tools to study tissue and disease development and drug discovery.

In this work, engineered vascular tissues from fibrin gel, mouse embryonic multipotent progenitor cell line (10T1/2 cells), and rat embryonic thoracic artery smooth muscle cells (A-10 cells) were used as models to study the Notch signaling pathway and vascular calcification. The 10T1/2 cells were successfully differentiated into vascular smooth muscle cells with TGFβ1 …