A conductive patch of carbon nanotubes can regenerate heart tissue growing in a dish, according to preliminary research from Brown University. The patch, made of tiny chains of carbon atoms that fold in on themselves, forming a tube, conducts electricity and mimics the rough surface of natural tissue. The more nanotubes the Brown researchers added to the patch, the more cells around it were able to regenerate.
During a heart attack, areas of the heart are deprived of oxygen, killing muscle and nerve cells used to keep the heart beating strongly and rhythmically. The tissue cannot regenerate on its own, which disrupts the heart’s rhythm, weakens it, and sometimes leads to a repeat heart attack. Tissue engineers around the globe are searching for ways to regenerate or repair this damaged tissue using different types of scaffolds and stem cells.
Thomas Webster, an associate professor of engineering and orthopedics at Brown and senior author of the study, says his work is distinctive because he examined not just the muscle cells that beat, but also the nerve cells that help them contract and the endothelial cells that line the blood vessels leading to and from the heart. The fact that the patch helped regenerate all three types of cells, which function interdependently in the heart, suggests the newly grown tissue is similar to normal heart tissue. The research was published today in Acta Biomaterialia.
In another development, a functioning strip of heart muscle has been created from mouse embryonic stem cells, thanks to the identification of a new type of cardiac stem cell. The research has not yet been repeated with human cells, but it lays a blueprint for how to generate heart muscle that could be used to repair damage from heart attacks and to test new drugs. The scientists, from Harvard University, are now working on isolating similar cardiac cells from lines of human stem cells.
Stem-cell therapy for heart disease has so far focused on trying to repair heart-attack damage with injections of patient-derived stem cells from bone marrow, but studies have yielded mixed results. Rather than using undifferentiated cells, “the push now is to try to obtain cardiac myocytes [heart muscle cells] from people and use them as patches that would be placed over damaged tissue in someone who has had a heart attack,” says Benoit Bruneau, a researcher at theGladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, in San Francisco. “They made engineered cardiac tissue from embryonic stem cells. From a bioengineering point of view, that’s significant.”
Embryonic stem cells, which are capable of forming any type of tissue in the body, can spontaneously form clumps of beating heart cells when grown in a dish. But it has been difficult to isolate large numbers of these cells from the mix of tissue types that can develop from embryonic stem cells. A heart patch would require a huge number of these cells, perhaps billions, says Christine Mummery, a biologist at the Leiden University Medical Center, in the Netherlands.
The Harvard team, led by Kenneth Chien, director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cardiovascular Research Center, in Boston, has made progress toward this goal, previously developing a method of isolating a master cardiac stem cell from embryonic stem cells and fetal tissue–one capable of producing all the cell types that make up the heart. In the most recent study, published today in the journalScience, Chien’s team developed a way to isolate particularly desirable progeny of this master stem cell, cells that produce only ventricular muscle cells, the type damaged in heart attacks. “If you want to create a cardiac patch, you want cells that will behave–that would line up nicely like they do in the heart,” says Bruneau.
Scientists genetically engineered mice to express two markers of different colors–one that marked the master cardiac stem cell, and the other that turns on when the cells start making muscle. They then isolated the 0.5 percent of cells in the developing mouse embryo that expressed both markers. In addition to making only ventricular muscle cells, these cells also have the ability to continue to reproduce, enabling the production of large volumes of cells. “This ability to divide and make muscle is something that normal heart cells do not have,” says Chien.
(Excerpt From MIT Journal)
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