During a heart attack, some obstruction is restricting—or sometimes even completely
cutting off—blood flow to the heart.
This deprives the heart of oxygen and nutrients, and without those, your heart can’t beat
properly and can become seriously damaged.
Now, if you’re lucky, you get to the doctor on time and receive the proper medical attention.
But even if you survive your heart attack, that part of your heart is still permanently
damaged, and the medical community has struggled with how to support damaged hearts.
But several new technologies, like growing stem cells to form a regenerative heart patch,
are being developed to give damaged hearts the support they need to recover and function
properly after a major destructive event like a heart attack.
And this technology is not the only one trying to repair heart damage.
Healing the heart after a heart attack is hard for many reasons, but one of those is
that the heart has to keep pumping blood.
So it has to keep expanding and contracting, not giving the damaged parts a chance to heal,
constantly deforming the parts that are compromised, forming thicker and thicker scar tissue that
keeps your heart from moving properly.
But you can’t just tell your heart to stay still for a while and let it recover, obviously,
so you’ve gotta come up with something else.
Enter one technology: an acellular viscoelastic adhesive epicardial patch—basically a bandaid
for your heart!
There have been several kinds proposed and tested, but this one has been computationally
optimized—and let me explain what that means.
This technology, coming out of a research collaboration between multiple universities
around the world, is the result of a specific computer model of the heart.
They modeled the heart’s normal function, the heart after a heart attack, and then the
heart after a heart attack with different kinds of patches so they could see what size
and thickness would work best to support the organ structurally as it beats—the patch
expanding and contracting with the heart.
Other patch technologies have not had their shape, size, thickness, and stiffness optimized
to move with the heart as it moves, which has been a barrier to the usefulness of this
technology.
This particular patch is made of a hydrogel, a biocompatible, highly breathable plastic—actually,
the same kind of material that contact lenses are made of —and the ‘viscoelastic’
part of its name means that it behaves as both a fluid and a solid, providing both expandable
flexibility and solid support at different points in the heart’s movement range.
This particular solution is very promising, with animal testing revealing that the patch
improves the amount of blood that damaged hearts can pump and reduces the strain on
damaged parts of the heart.
But it’s only one of many options being explored at the moment.
Another team out of Imperial College London had created a living patch of cells that could
be grafted onto a damaged heart to not only support it as it recovers but potentially
even help the heart regenerate healthy tissue.
They grow stem cells into full-fledged patches of living muscle, about 2 by 3 centimeters
large, that move and contract on their own, and the researchers hope the patch could eventually
electrically and mechanically become a part of your heart, as opposed to just a surface
bandaid.
Stem cells have been used as a possible heart repair mechanism before, but they were previously
injected directly into the heart, which didn’t give them much of a chance to actually repair
any tissue before the heart cleared them out.
The advantage of introducing them in a patch is that they have a cellular scaffold that
keeps them in place long enough to do their job and try to make your heart healthy again.
Duke University is pursuing a similar stem cell route and creating reparative heart patches
out of stem cells to reverse the damage done to hearts during heart attacks, so the world
is really invested in solving this problem.
Cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death in the world.
And a significant percentage of that heart failure is because people are surviving heart
attacks, but their hearts never recover, and can’t continue to pump blood properly.
So advancements in healing bandages for damaged and dying hearts could drastically improve
outcomes for those affected by heart disease.
If you want even more on how machines are improving our health in surprising ways, check
out this video over here on this 3D printed lung.
Always make sure you come back to Seeker for your medical innovation news, and as always,
thanks for watching.