Regenerative and tissue engineering research in CHD has been one of the main themes of Caputo’s BHF Chair for the last 5-years. Under the prestigious Sir Jules Thorn Award for Biochemical Research, significant progress has been made in developing tissue engineered vascular structures, in the form of conduits and patches, exploiting perinatal and surgical tissue as a valuable source of Stem Cells for allogenic cell therapy, to improve surgical outcomes of patients born with Tetralogy of Fallot spectrum. It has been shown that it is possible to isolate and expand clinically valuable numbers of stem cells from perinatal tissues (umbilical cord, neonatal thymus and neonatal heart) and to grow them on biocompatible scaffolds. Indeed, a standard operative protocol for stem cells seeding and growth on a decellularised extracellular matrix has been optimised. 

The tissue engineered products have been evaluated in vitro qualitatively and for mechanical performance. Additionally, they were tested in our developed in vivo large animal models for biocompatibility and efficacy to validate our tissue engineered graft cellularization strategy. Furthermore, a research and clinical collaboration with the GMP Centre for Cell, Gene & Tissue Therapeutics, Royal Free Hospital, UCL (Director Prof M Lowdell) has been established to manufacture the tissue engineered products in a GMP environment and validate the good quality (QC) for clinical translation of the products (BHF Translational Award TA/F/21/210028).