Cardiac Patch for a Broken Heart

Roland Piquepaille writes "People who suffered from heart attacks or other heart failures often need transplants because their hearts are essentially non-functioning. But imagine what would happen if it was possible to engineer living heart tissues to fix these broken hearts? This is what bioengineers at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City are starting to make. According to HealthDay News, their patches for broken hearts are made of heart tissue grown in the lab. Right now, animal trials are just starting and it will take at least a decade before human trials begin. But when these living bandages are ready for cardiac care, they'll have the potential to save millions of lives in the world every year."

Very interesting, but why just for cardiac tissue?

[keilinw]

This is all very interesting. If and when they do manage to come out with the cardiac patch I would suspect (as well as hope) that they would have patches to fix other tissue types (striated, smooth, etc).

I'm also wondering if it was possible to use cancer research to produce an anti-cancer... No I do not mean a cancer cure, but an infection of healthy living tissue. Is it possible to introduce healthy tissue into a body or system and have it spread in a cancer like fashion repairing everything in its path? That would be way too cool!

--Matt Wong
http://www.themindofmatthew.com [themindofmatthew.com]

Tissue Engineering isn't just for hearts either.

[mwooldri]

My son's bladder was born on the outside - and needed it reversed. His surgeon at the time got to the point before putting it back in the body but then something happened: he moved on. However his new surgeon - Dr. Atala - is a guy renowned in the field for tissue re-engineering. My son's bladder is now back on the inside but one of the exciting things that is happening right now is that he has more of a chance of getting his bladder completely fixed out now than at any other time. His bladder is too small... and needs augmenting. The "traditional" way has been to augment the bladder with intestine tissue (often needing an extra channel for urine excretion), but Dr. Atala has managed to figure out how to augment the bladder - at least AFAIK in animals - with engineered tissue based on the original bladder. And the guy was attracted to our area to continue his research.

I'm excited about this growth area in medicine - not as a doctor or as a medical professional (sorry I am squeamish at blood) - but as a parent of a child who stands to benefit enormously from this kind of research. I hope and pray that this kind of stuff - patching hearts, augmenting bladders, mending broken organs in general - all develops and gets to the point of viability in time.

Mark.

Why not stop the root causes?

[linzeal]

Either tax cigarettes out of existance, prevent people from obtaining health care on the government's dime if they smoked or ban them altogether. Allowing cigarettes to exist after 400 years of knowing about their disastrous consequences for not only the smoker but people around him is insane.

Start a fat and salt tax. If you serve more than 100 customers a day and your food is unhealthy charge the expected cost in healthcare that triple cheeseburger is going to cost in 30 years when that customer is just another fat ass with colon cancer.

Make cities walkable again, set off a portion of every downtown that people can walk around without the smell of diesel and gasoline in their nostrils on an otherwise fine day.

Public Health costs

[Freaky Spook]

Currently people awaiting donors for hearts are assesed on age & how they live & will they benefit a heart.

I know there are a lot of people who live a good life & then suffer heart failure, but there is also a lot of people simply who simply live badly, they drink and smoke too much, eat too much & they don't exercise.

If there was a quick fix to heart problems, how many people would change their lives? Would they improve their quality of living or would they simply just resume their old ways & end up having to have the procedure again at the expense of the public health system.

Im all for ways of improving our chance of living through medicine, but there are a lot of people who bring upon these conditions because of their own lazyness & over-indulgence. Fixing their hearts won't nessesarily make them want to improve other area's of their life which created the heart problem in the beginning.

With medicine getting better & much more serious conditions being able to be fixed a lot easier, what are the social implications of this, humans are lazy, would it help create a society of people less concerned about their health? And what would that cost?

True Story

[TubeSteak]

I had an old teacher who's had TWO artificial hearts. The first one was your standard pump driven noisemaker.

However, the pump mashes up the blood cells and was giving him anemia.

Soooo... They pulled it out and stuck in a new one. This artificial heart has a turbine in it to push the blood along. He no longer has a pulse, just a blood pressure.

Re:Very interesting, but why just for cardiac tiss

[xanthines-R-yummy]

...because cardiac tissue usually doesn't regenerate. Your heart is significantly weakened after a heart attack, so "whatever doesn't kill you make you stonger" doesn't apply.

As others pointed out, planting "healthy" tissue that outgrows cancer is just giving someone a worse cancer.

Much More Complex Than Growing Meat

[Quirk]

Recently there has been a spate of stories about growing meat for human consumption. In growing meat for consumption there is a need for the tissue to be stretched to provide the 'exercise' for the growing muscles. [bbc.co.uk] Presently the cost to manufacture a single burger would run into the millions of dollars.

Growing heart tissue would be much more demanding requring "exercising" the muscle, plus as the article pointed out there are problems of tissue acceptance, adhesion and syncing the pulse of the muscle patch to the existing heart tissue. Given these hurtles it looks like this technology has many hurtles to jump.

Pursuing an interest in Dictyostelium amoebae [dictybase.org] provides an starting point to studying chemotaxis and cellular communication.

Exciting! Holy cow, I want this!

[Trifthen]

This really strikes me as an exciting breakthrough. I had heart surgery back in 1984 to repair a hole between my ventricles that drastically increased the viability of my life. Aside from having my ribs stapled together, I have a Dacron (a type of polyester) patch in my heart because the hole was too large to simply sew shut. Aside from basically being in good health since then, I'm always afraid that the growth of my heart in the intervening years is unduly stressing the patch; I was only seven when I underwent the surgery. I've always wondered if I could have my heart repaired properly; what it would mean to my energy levels, strength and peace of mind.

The real question is, could they grow a proper heart or replacement pieces from my genes at all? I had six major life-threatening heart defects that were mostly corrected, but there's always that lingering feeling that things could be better. If not for the surgery, I'm sure I'd be dead by now. Hell, I almost didn't make it past two months. Would something like this work for me? Would it be worth going back in there to complete the repairs?

Who knows. But I have to say this is definitely a thought-provoking piece of information. Unlike people who undergo heart-surgery in their later years, I never had a fully functional heart. Ah, the possibilities!

For those keeping score, this should sate your curiosity:

1. Faulty aortal valve: mostly corrected, slight murmur remains
2. Transposed position (It leans right instead of left): uncorrected
3. Half expected size: repairs later encouraged growth
4. Unknown muscle-tissue grown over heart: removed
5. Large hole between ventricles: covered with Dacron patch
6. Two small holes between atria: sewn shut

Re:Try it in your own country...

[linzeal]

Than why when I walk out of any grocery store, movie theater or college classroom in America will half the time I be confronted with cigarette smoke? It is my responsibility to protect myself but how can I do that, shoot the smoker in self defense?