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Abstract: Reproducibility of clinical output is important when investigating therapeutic efcacy in pre-clinical animal studies. Due to its physiological relevance, a swine myocardial infarction (MI) model has been widely used to evaluate the efectiveness of stem cells or tissue-engineered constructs for ischemic heart diseases. Several methods are used to induce MI in the swine model. However, it is difcult, using these approaches, to obtain a similar level of functional outcomes from a group of animals due to interpersonal variation, leading to increased experimental cost. Hence, in order to minimize human intervention, we developed an approach to use a customized occluder that has dimensional similarities with that of the coronary artery of animals in the case of the swine model. We carried out angiography to measure the diameter of the middle left anterior descending artery of each individual animal to fabricate the customized occluder using a 3D-printing system. The fabricated occluder contained a central hole smaller than that of the targeted middle left anterior descending artery to mimic an atherosclerotic coronary artery that has an approximately 20% blocked condition. Interestingly, the 3D-printed occluder can provide continuous blood fow through the central pore, indicating a high survival rate (88%) of up to 28 days post-operation. This method showed the possibility of creating consistent myocardial infarction induction as compared to the conventional representative closed-chest method (50% survival rate), thus highlighting how our method can have a profound efect on accelerating reliable experiments for developing new therapeutic approaches to ischemic heart diseases.

韩国全南大学医学院Young J. Hong等 | 定制3D打印封堵器在猪模型中再现一致且稳定的心力衰竭

本研究论文聚焦使用3D打印技术帮助构建稳定的动物疾病模型相关研究。在临床前动物研究中研究治疗效果时，临床结果的可重复性很重要。由于其生理相关性，猪心肌梗死（MI）模型已被广泛用于评估干细胞或组织工程构建体对缺血性心脏病的有效性。现有几种方法用于在猪模型中诱导心肌梗死，然而由于个体差异问题，使用这些方法很难从一组动物中获得相似水平的功能结果，从而导致实验成本增加。因此，为了最大限度地减少人为干预，本文作者开发了一种使用定制封堵器的方法，该封堵器与猪模型中动物冠状动脉的尺寸相似。本文作者进行了血管造影术，以测量每个动物的左前降支中段动脉的直径，并使用3D打印系统制造定制的封堵器。制造的封堵器包含一个比目标左中前下动脉小的中央孔，以模拟动脉粥样硬化冠状动脉，其阻塞状况约为20%。有趣的是，3D打印的封堵器可以通过中心孔提供连续的血流，术后有长达28天的高存活率（88%）。与传统的代表性闭胸方法（50%存活率）相比，该方法显示出产生一致的心肌梗死诱导的可能性。这些结果强调了本文提出的方法可以加速可靠的实验，并对开发缺血性心脏病的新治疗方法产生深远影响。