Scientists have developed implantable patches made of beating heart muscle that can help repair damaged hearts. This breakthrough offers hope for patients with advanced heart failure who lack access to organ transplants or face the risks and complications of artificial heart pumps.
Damaged hearts can literally be patched up to help them work, say researchers, in what has been hailed as a groundbreaking development for people with advanced heart failure. Heart failure affects more than 64 million people worldwide, with causes including heart attacks, high blood pressure, and coronary artery disease. For heart transplants, there is a shortage of available organs, while artificial heart pumps are expensive and come with a high rate of complications.
Now scientists believe they have made a breakthrough by creating implantable patches composed of beating heart muscle that can help the organ contract. \One of the researchers, Prof. Kutschka, said, “We now have, for the first time, a laboratory-grown biological transplant available, which has the potential to stabilize and strengthen the heart muscle.” The patches are made from cells taken from blood and “reprogrammed” to act as stem cells, which can develop into any cell type in the body. In the case of the patches, these cells are turned into heart muscle and connective tissue cells. They are embedded in a collagen gel and grown in a custom-made mold before the resulting hexagonal patches are attached, in arrays, to a membrane. For humans, this membrane is about 5cm by 10cm in size. Prof. Wolfram-Hubertus Zimmermann, another author of the work from University Medical Center Göttingen, said the muscle in the patches had the characteristics of a heart that was just four to eight years old. \The team says the patches are an important development because directly injecting heart muscle cells into the heart can lead to the growth of tumors or result in the development of an irregular heartbeat – which can be deadly. The patches, however, allow many more heart muscle cells to be administered with a higher retention and, it appears, no risk of such unwanted effects. Zimmermann and colleagues report how they tested the patches in healthy rhesus macaques, finding no evidence of irregular heartbeats, tumor formation, or deaths or disease related to the patches. When the team studied the hearts of the animals up to six months after the patches were implanted, they found a thickening of the heart wall – with the extent dependent on the number of patches used. The team also tested the patches in monkeys with a disease akin to chronic heart failure. In this case, the team found signs of improved heart function, such as a greater ability of the heart wall to contract. The researchers then applied the approach to a 46-year-old woman with advanced heart failure. In this case, the patches were made from human cells taken from a donor, and were sutured onto the patient’s beating heart with minimally invasive surgery.
HEART FAILURE BIOTECHNOLOGY CARDIAC REGENERATION STEM CELLS MEDICAL TRANSPLANT
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