Intracellular proteomics and extracellular vesiculomics as a metric of disease recapitulation in 3D-bioprinted aortic valve arrays | Science Advances

In calcific aortic valve disease (CAVD), mechanosensitive valvular cells respond to fibrosis- and calcification-induced tissue stiffening, further driving pathophysiology. No pharmacotherapeutics are available to treat CAVD because of the paucity of (i) appropriate experimental models that recapitulate this complex environment and (ii) benchmarking novel engineered aortic valve (AV)–model performance. We established a biomaterial-based CAVD model mimicking the biomechanics of the human AV disease-prone fibrosa layer, three-dimensional (3D)–bioprinted into 96-well arrays. Liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry analyses probed the cellular proteome and vesiculome to compare the 3D-bioprinted model versus traditional 2D monoculture, against human CAVD tissue. The 3D-bioprinted model highly recapitulated the CAVD cellular proteome (94% versus 70% of 2D proteins). Integration of cellular and vesicular datasets identified known and unknown proteins ubiquitous to AV calcification. This study explores how 2D versus 3D-bioengineered systems recapitulate unique aspects of human disease, positions multiomics as a technique for the evaluation of high throughput–based bioengineered model systems, and potentiates future drug discovery.