How to Mend a Broken Heart
Aug 13, 2009 | Posted by in Featured, Surgery | 0 Comments
Massachusetts Institute of Technology is aiming to make broken hearts a thing of the past with the development of new scaffolding technology.
The innovation aims to encourage healthy living in patients with cardiac damage by patching up any weak spots on the heart’s surface.
Such a patch is created by growing heart or stem cells over a scaffolding structure.
This biological sticking plaster may then be fused on to the heart, eventually being absorbed into the organ by the recipient’s body.
According to the developers of the system, it has a number of benefits over previous methods of patching up the heart which could help patients to achieve healthy living conditions post-treatment.
These include a response to electrical stimulation in line with that of natural tissue – whereby the cells contract in a specific direction when an impulse is received.
Meanwhile, an innate ability to be stretched more easily longitudinally than circumferentially has also been reported.
Such features lead the developers to claim that this is the first graft for heart tissue to be designed specifically to mimic the natural function of cells in the organ.
Previous research conducted in collaboration between the University of Western Ontario and the University of Toronto found that a congenital heart defect may not increase the likelihood of an individual dying following a cardiac event.
Investigators discovered that patients with bicuspid aortic valves – which have two flaps instead of the usual three – are no more likely to die following a heart attack or similar event than those with normal valves.