PREPARATION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF ELECTROSPUN POLY(D,L-LACTIDE-CO-GLYCOLIDE) SCAFFFOLDS FOR VASCULAR TISSUE ENGINEERING AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF AN IN VITRO BLOOD VESSEL MIMIC Tiffany Richelle Peña Currently, an estimated 1 in every 3 adult Americans are affected by one or more cardiovascular complications. The most common complication is coronary artery disease, specifically atherosclerosis. Outcomes of balloon angioplasty treatments have been significantly improved with the addition of drug

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... uting stents to the process. Although both bare metal and drug eluting stents have greatly increased the effectiveness of angioplasty and decreased the occurrence of restenosis, several complications still exist. For this reason, the stent industry is continually advancing toward better stent and drug-eluting designs, deployment methods, and adjuvant drug therapies, necessitating fast, reliable pre-clinical test methods. Recently, advancements in tissue engineering have led to the development of an in vitro blood vessel mimic (BVM) and the feasibility of evaluating cellular response to intravascular device implantation has been demonstrated. There are several physiological and scalability limitations of the current BVM model that must be addressed before effective use of the model can be initiated. The limiting aspect addressed in this thesis is the use of expanded poly(tetrafluorethylene) [ePTFE] scaffolding for the development of the BVM. There are several disadvantages and limitations to ePTFE including high cost and non-native mechanical properties. The ability to produce and tailor scaffolds in-house would greatly impact the scalability, cost effectiveness, and control over scaffold properties for BVM optimization. Also,