| Posted: Jun 27, 2016 |
Building a smart cardiac patch with nanoelectronic scaffolds and living cells
(Nanowerk News) Scientists and doctors in recent decades have made vast leaps in the treatment of cardiac problems - particularly with the development in recent years of so-called "cardiac patches," swaths of engineered heart tissue that can replace heart muscle damaged during a heart attack.
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Thanks to the work of Charles Lieber and others, the next leap may be in sight.
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The Mark Hyman, Jr. Professor of Chemistry and Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Lieber, postdoctoral fellow Xiaochuan Dai and other co-authors of a study that describes the construction of nanoscale electronic scaffolds that can be seeded with cardiac cells to produce a "bionic" cardiac patch. The study is described in a June 27 paper published in Nature Nanotechnology ("Three-dimensional mapping and regulation of action potential propagation in nanoelectronics-innervated tissues").
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"I think one of the biggest impacts would ultimately be in the area that involves replaced of damaged cardiac tissue with pre-formed tissue patches," Lieber said. "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."
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Once implanted, Lieber said, the bionic patch could act similarly to a pacemaker - delivering electrical shocks to correct arrhythmia, but the possibilities don't end there.
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"In this study, we've shown we can change the frequency and direction of signal propagation," he continued. "We believe it could be very important for controlling arrhythmia and other cardiac conditions."
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Unlike traditional pacemakers, Lieber said, the bionic patch - because its electronic components are integrated throughout the tissue - can detect arrhythmia far sooner, and operate at far lower voltages.
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"Even before a person started to go into large-scale arrhythmia that frequently causes irreversible damage or other heart problems, this could detect the early-stage instabilities and intervene sooner," he said. "It can also continuously monitor the feedback from the tissue and actively respond."
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"And a normal pacemaker, because it's on the surface, has to use relatively high voltages," Lieber added.
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The patch might also find use, Lieber said, as a tool to monitor the responses under cardiac drugs, or to help pharmaceutical companies to screen the effectiveness of drugs under development.
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Likewise, the bionic cardiac patch can also be a unique platform, he further mentioned, to study the tissue behavior evolving during some developmental processes, such as aging, ischemia or differentiation of stem cells into mature cardiac cells.
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Although the bionic cardiac patch has not yet been implanted in animals, "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."
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In the long term, Lieber believes, the development of nanoscale tissue scaffolds represents a new paradigm for integrating biology with electronics in a virtually seamless way.
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Using the injectable electronics technology he pioneered last year, Lieber even suggested that similar cardiac patches might one day simply be delivered by injection.
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"It may actually be that, in the future, this won't be done with a surgical patch," he said. "We could simply do a co-injection of cells with the mesh, and it assembles itself inside the body, so it's less invasive."
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