Heart cells beat in bioscaffold for babies
A painstaking effort to create a biocompatible patch to heal infant hearts is paying off at Rice University and Texas Children’s Hospital.
The proof is in a petri dish in Jeffrey Jacot’s lab, where a small slab of gelatinous material beats with the rhythm of a living heart.
Jacot, lead author Seokwon Pok, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice, and their tissue-engineering colleagues have published the results of years of effort to produce a material called a bioscaffold that could be sutured into the hearts of infants suffering from birth defects. The scaffold, seeded with living cardiac cells, is designed to support the growth of healthy new tissue. Over time, it would degrade and leave a repaired heart.
The research was detailed in the Elsevier journal Acta Biomaterialia.
Patches used now to repair congenital heart defects are made of synthetic fabrics or are taken from cows or from the patient’s own body. About one in 125 babies born in the United States suffers such a defect; three to six of every 10,000 have what’s known as a defect called Tetralogy of Fallot, a cause of “blue baby syndrome” that requires the surgical placement of a patch across the heart’s right ventricular outflow tract.
Current strategies work well until the patches, which do not grow with the patient, need to be replaced, said Jacot, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice University, director of the Pediatric Cardiac Bioengineering Laboratory at the Congenital Heart Surgery Service at Texas Children’s Hospital and an adjunct professor at Baylor College of Medicine.
“None of those patches are alive,” Jacot said, including the biologically derived patches that are “more like a plastic” and are not incorporated into the heart tissue.
“They’re in a muscular area in the heart that’s important for contraction and, more so, for electrical conduction,” he said. “Electrical signals have to go around this area of dead tissue. And having dead tissue means the heart produces less force, so it’s not surprising that children with these types of repairs are more at risk for developing heart failure, arrhythmias and fibrillation.
“What we’re making can replace current patches in an operation that surgeons are already familiar with and that has a very high short- and medium-term success rate, but with long-term complications,” he said.
A better scaffold would have to perform many functions perfectly. It must be strong enough to withstand the pressures delivered by a beating heart yet flexible enough to expand and contract; porous enough to allow new heart cells to migrate, make connections and excrete their own natural scaffold to replace the patch; and tough enough to handle sutures but still be able to biodegrade over just the right amount of time for natural tissue to take over.
via Rice University – MIKE WILLIAMS
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