Advancing Cardiac Tissue Engineering: Melt Electrowriting Conductive Polymer-Hydrogel Scaffolds

Abstract

Myocardial infarction highlights an urgent need for strategies to regenerate functional cardiac tissue. Cardiac tissue engineering offers a promising approach; however, fabricating scaffolds that simultaneously integrate precise architectural anisotropy, mechanical compliance, and electrical conductivity remains an open challenge. In this work, we utilized melt electrowriting (MEW) to construct well-defined, 20-layer anisotropic rhomboidal polycaprolactone (PCL) scaffolds. We characterised them by tensile testing and by micro- and nanoscale microscopy. While introducing electrical conductivity via bulk blending with fillers (polypyrrole (PPy), polyaniline, or graphene oxide) compromised MEW print fidelity and failed to achieve physiological conductivity, surface coating strategies effectively combined conductivity from structural mechanics. Electrical and mechanical testing revealed that gold sputter coating and in situ PPy polymerization both imparted robust electrical conductivity while preserving the microfibrous architecture. However, when seeded with human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs) in fibrin hydrogels, only the gold-coated scaffolds supported synchronized, robust, and sustained contractile activity. PPy-coating resulted in functionally restricted constructs, suggesting that excessive structural rigidity limited tissue deformability. Gene expression analysis further revealed that elevated electrical conductivity alone does not drive hiPSC-CM maturation. Our data indicates that successful cardiac patch design relies on the integrated optimization of mechanics and architecture rather than treating conductivity as an isolated parameter, offering foundational guidelines for developing translational bioengineered heart patches. Graphical Abstract O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=170 SRC="FIGDIR/small/740898v2_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (90K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@8c6656org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@192c99forg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1f2f6f1org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@325ec1_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG