Band Aid for the heart
12 Jul 2011 by Evoluted New Media
When someone suffers a heart attack, part of their heart dies, but researchers in America and India believe they have created a nanopatch which can restore areas that have been damaged
When someone suffers a heart attack, part of their heart dies, but researchers in America and India believe they have created a nanopatch which can restore areas that have been damaged
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Engineers at Brown University have created a nanopatch for the heart that tests show restores areas that have been damaged, such as from a heart attack Credit: Frank Mullin, Brown University |
Researchers from Brown University and the India Institute of Technology Kanpur have developed a scaffold structure consisting of carbon nanofibres and a polymer. Initial tests show that the synthetic nanopatch – which researchers have dubbed the black Band Aid – regenerated natural heart tissue cells and neurons.
“The whole idea is to put something where dead tissue is to help regenerate it, so that you eventually have a healthy heart,” said lead author David Stout, a graduate from Brown’s school of engineering.
Researchers developed helical-shaped nanotubes – with diameters between 60 and 200 nanometres – into fibres which they stitched together with a poly lactic-co-glycolic acid polymer to form a mesh about 22mm long and 15 microns thick.
In tests, the mesh was laid on a glass substrate to test whether cardiomyocytes would colonise the surface and grow more cells. A 200nm diameter carbon nanofibre seeded with cardiomyocytes showed five times as many heart tissue cells colonised the surface after four hours than with a control sample consisting of the polymer only.
The nanofibres are excellent conductors of electrons and perform the same kind of electrical connections the heart relies on for keeping a steady beat. The scaffold is elastic and durable, and can expand and contract much like heart tissue – it is because of this that cardiomyocytes and neurons congregate on the scaffold and spawn new cells.
The scientists now want to tweak the scaffold pattern to better mimic the electrical current of the heart, as well as build an in vivo model to see how the material reacts to the heart’s voltage and beat.
