Connexin-Based Therapeutics and Tissue Engineering Approaches to the Amelioration of Chronic Pancreatitis and Type I Diabetes: Construction and Characterization of a Novel Prevascularized Bioartificial Pancreas

Figure 2

Islets seeded into SPECs embed throughout the body of the construct. Cryoembedded SPECs with and without islets were sectioned, fixed, and labeled for nuclei (blue), islets (insulin, green), and endothelial cells (CD31, red). The images are maximum projections of z-stacks acquired by confocal microscopy under 20x magnification (a), and 63x magnification [(b), boxed region in (a)]. Islets can be seen both in the periphery and the interior of the islet-containing SPECs. It is interesting to note that the vascular network extends to the interior of the construct and that this is also not disrupted by the presence of islets. Scale bars represent 100 μm and 50 μm in (a) and (b), respectively.

(a)

(b)