Research review paperWeaving for heart valve tissue engineering

- Weaving enables creating 3D constructs with anisotropy and mechanical properties imitating the properties of native tissues.
- Cell, growth factors, and drugs can be introduced onto fibers and woven. Fibers provide directionality to the cells leading.
- Textiles are characterized by high porosity, allowing nutrients, oxygen, and growth factors to penetrate their structure.
- Weaving is complementary to additive manufacturing, electrospinning, and gel formation. Looms for 3d weaving are demanded.
- Weaving can be performed with threads containing viable cells, and used in a process called organ weaving.

Weaving is a resourceful technology which offers a large selection of solutions that are readily adaptable for tissue engineering (TE) of artificial heart valves (HV). The different ways that the yarns are interlaced in this technique could be used to produce complex architectures, such as the three-layer architecture of the leaflets. Once the assembly is complete, growth of cells in the scaffold would occur in the orientation of the yarn, enabling the deposition of extra cellular matrixes proteins in an oriented manner. Weaving technology is a rapidly evolving field that, first, needs to be understood, and then explored by tissue engineers, so that it could be used to create efficient scaffolds. Similarly, the textile engineers need to gain a basic understanding of key structural and mechanical aspects of the heart valve. The aim of this review is to provide the platform for joining these two fields and to enable cooperative research efforts. Moreover, examples of woven medical products and patents as well as related publication are discussed in this review, nevertheless due to the large, and continuously growing volume of data, only the aspects strictly associated with HVTE lay in the scope of this paper.