6-Month Aortic Valve Implantation of an Off-the-Shelf Tissue-engineered Valve in Sheep

Diseased aortic valves often require replacement, with over 30% of the current aortic valve surgeries performed in patients who will outlive a bioprosthetic valve. While many promising tissue-engineered valves have been created in the lab using the cell-seeded polymeric scaffold paradigm, none have been successfully tested long-term in the aortic position of pre-clinical model. ... A customized pulse duplicator system was designed based on a commercial wave generator and pump (ViVitro Systems). ...