A new heart biomaterial delivered soon after a heart attack can heal the damaged body from the inside.
A heart attack kills cardiac muscle, leaving the heart scarred and permanently damaged after six hours. It prevents damage to the heart by working properly. If there was a way to start healing as soon as the tissue was damaged after a heart attack, doctors could stop the scar from developing.
“In an ideal world, you treat the patient immediately when they have a heart attack, to try to save some of the tissue and promote regeneration,” says Karen Christman, a bioengineer at the University of California, San Diego.
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The study of this ideal inspired Christman and a team of researchers to develop biomaterials. In rodents and pigs, it appears to repair tissue damage and reduce inflammation directly after a heart attack, Christman and colleagues report on December 29. The nature of customer engineering.
“I think there’s a lot of potential,” said Vimala Bharadwaj, a biomedical scientist at Stanford University who was not involved in the research. The paper is “definitely a good idea for what they’re trying to do.”
Previously, researchers found that stem cells derived from body fat could be used to heal bones, muscles and the heart.SN: 3/9/16). Christ wanted to work with the extracellular matrix, the protein lattices that provide structural support to the cells in the muscle tissue of the heart. Like stem cells, they have promising capabilities but are much less expensive, he says.
In 2009, Christ’s team produced a hydrogel using particles from this matrix. Trials in mice and later in humans have shown that the compound binds to damaged areas and increases cell repair and growth. However, due to the relatively large hydrogel particles, it could only be delivered to the heart via a needle.
“Pricked with a needle in the heart arrhythmia,” said Christ. To use this treatment, doctors must wait several weeks until the heart is more stable and the chances of irregular heartbeats are reduced. And that too late, lest it be scarred.
Having previously created a hydrogel, the team sifted out the larger particles in a centrifuge, so that only the nanoparticles remained, and added water to dilute the mixture. Creating a material thin enough to be delivered intravenously to the heart’s blood vessels.
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Based on the size of the nanoparticles, the team hoped the mixture would slip through some of the gaps in the cardiac vessels during the heart attack and stick to surrounding tissue. Once there, while the heart was healing, it would create a fortress.
But animal experiments have shown that the extracellular matrix binds to the vascular matrix, preventing some inflammatory cells from moving into the heart tissue in the first place and causing damage. The material reduced inflammation in the heart and stimulated the healing process by encouraging cell proliferation, the team reports.
In addition, safety studies will be necessary to prepare clinical trials for acquiring biomaterials. The first trial in men will probably be to rebuild the heart tissue after the heart attack. “A lot of my motivation is moving out of the lab, into the real world,” says Christ.
Another real-world application of the biomaterial could be treatment for ruptured blood vessels in other hard-to-access organs, including the brain after traumatic injury, notes Christman.
While Bharadwaj finds that application potentially promising, he says tests are needed to see if the biomaterial increases headache and cognitive or memory deficits in the brain after a traumatic injury. It remains to be seen whether TBI treatment is truly effective.
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