The treatment of cardiac problems has improved dramatically in the latest decades. One of the innovations that particularly have helped to achieve this medical advance is the ‘cardiac patch’. During a heart attack, the blood supply to a part of the heart stops, causing damage or death to that part of the heart. In this scenario, the damaged heart muscle can be replaced with ‘cardiac patches’, which are strips of engineered tissue.
Now, a team of Harvard researchers described the construction of nanoscale electronic scaffolds that can be seeded with cardiac cells, to produce a bionic cardiac patch in an article published in Nature.
“I think one of the biggest impacts would ultimately be in the area that involves replaced or damaged cardiac tissue with pre-formed tissue patches,” said Charles M. Lieber, Professor at of Chemistry at The Mark Hyman Jr. and chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University.
“Rather than simply implanting an engineered patch built on a passive scaffold, our works suggests it will be possible to surgically implant an innervated patch that would now be able to monitor and subtly adjust its performance,” Lieber added.
According with the researcher, among several possibilities, the bionic patch will be able to deliver electrical shocks to correct any arrhythmia, similarly to a pacemaker. Because the patch’s electronic components are integrated throughout the tissue, in comparison with traditional pacemakers, it can operate at far lower voltages and detect any arrhythmia far sooner.
“In this study, we’ve shown we can change the frequency and direction of signal propagation,” he said. For this reason the team of researchers believes the patch could be very important for controlling arrhythmia and other cardiac conditions.
Besides controlling abnormal heartbeat rhythms, the patch may also help to monitor cardiac responses to drugs, assessing the effectiveness of drugs under development, and to study the cardiac tissue behavior during some developmental processes, such differentiation of stem cells into mature cardiac cells, ischemia, or aging.
So far the bionic patch has not been tested in animal trials. “We are interested in identifying collaborators already investigating cardiac patch implantation to treat myocardial infarction in a rodent model,” he said. “I don’t think it would be difficult to build this into a simpler, easily implantable system.”
Source: Harvard Gazette
