Summary
Cell therapy is a promising way to restore blood supply to ischemic tissue, but simply injecting loose cells rarely delivers them precisely to the recipient’s vasculature. Wrapping a cell-engineered scaffold around the blocked artery could overcome this. Here the authors fabricate 3D woodpile- and channel-shaped scaffolds from polycaprolactone (PCL) using a computer-assisted pressure-assisted micro-syringe writing system, then coat them with electrospun gelatin nanofibers. The composite scaffolds were seeded with human adventitial progenitor cells (APCs) isolated from saphenous-vein surgical leftovers; channel-shaped, GPTMS-crosslinked scaffolds gave the best cell alignment, survival and growth. When implanted around the femoral artery of mice with limb ischemia, these scaffolds — with or without APCs — accelerated recovery of limb blood flow and boosted arteriogenesis, pointing to perivascular cell-engineered scaffolds as a therapeutic route for peripheral ischemia.