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Sunday, October 26, 2014
Israelis test gold-plated 'cardiac patch'
to treat heart attacks.
Andrew Tobin
Times of Israel
I
sraeli researchers are testing a bio-
compatible gold-plated "cardiac
patch" built by using the patient's
own tissues — and with the potential to
reverse heart damage for the first time.
Up to now, serious heart damage
from attacks or disease can be treated
only by heart transplants. While the
procedure has saved thousands of lives
over the past half century, the main
drawbacks are a lack of enough donors,
rejection rates and high costs.
If it were possible to transplant just
parts of the heart muscle to replace
damaged sections that would be a prom-
ising alternative. But researchers have
yet to figure out how to get the replace-
ment tissue, called a cardiac patch, to
conduct electricity or to be accepted by
the recipient's immune system.
In a forward-looking study pub-
lished in the journal Nano Letters in
September, the Israeli researchers tested
a cardiac patch they engineered using
a new technique and enhanced with
gold nanoparticles, which appeared to
improve the cardiac patch's electrical
conductivity. Heartbeat is controlled
by electrical impulses generated by the
heart tissue itself.
While they used animal tissues in
the study, the researchers say that in
the future, the same kind of cardiac
patch could be made from the tissues
of a human transplant recipient. In this
form, the patch could be personalized
to also avoid immune system rejection.
Clinical trials are several years away.
A Golden Opportunity
A heart attack blocks blood supply to the
heart, damaging or killing affected tis-
sue. Because heart cells cannot multiply
and because heart muscles contain few
stem cells, the tissue is unable to repair
itself. Along with other technologies,
cardiac patches are being developed to
repair the heart without replacing it.
If the kinks are worked out, the
impact could be significant.
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Heart disease is the leading cause of
death in Western countries. The only
treatment for advanced heart disease
today is heart transplant. But almost half
of the people on donation lists today
have been waiting for more than a year,
and about the same percentage of people
die within five years of their first heart
attack, according to the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention.
Professor Tal Dvir, a bioengineer at
Tel Aviv University, has been engineer-
ing heart tissue in his lab since 2011,
using various materials like animal tis-
sues, collagen springs and gold nanopar-
ticles. In the latest study, he and his stu-
dents engineered the first cardiac patch
made with animal tissues and with gold
nanoparticles. Dvir introduced the engi-
neering technique in a study published
this summer.
Cardiac patches are engineered by
allowing heart cells to grow on a 3-D
scaffold, similar to the extracellular
matrix that naturally supports the cells
in the heart. In the study, the researchers
derived the extracellular matrix for their
cardiac patch from a membrane taken
from a pig's abdomen, a biomaterial also
found in humans.
Because foreign bodies can trigger an
immune system response in a recipi-
ent, they removed all the pig cells and
antigens from the membrane. They then
coated the remaining cocktail-napkin-
sized scaffold with gold nanoparticles.
To turn the gold-coated scaffold into
a cardiac patch, the researchers "seeded"
it with stem cells taken from rat hearts.
Over time, the cells came together to
form a tissue that generated its own
electrical impulses and expanded and
contracted spontaneously.
With microscopic imaging and chemi-
cal and electrical tests, the researchers
found that the cardiac patch looked
more like natural heart tissue and con-
tracted more forcefully with less electri-
cal stimulation than did a cardiac patch
without a golden sheen.
"The results we got were very nice
Reversing Damage on page 34
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