After a heart attack, the fresh biomaterial can help repair damaged tissue from the inside out.
After just six hours, heart attacks permanently scar the heart and cause permanent damage by killing the cardiac muscle tissue. The heart’s ability to beat normally is compromised by the damage. Doctors could avoid the formation of scar tissue if there was a technique to start mending damaged tissue quickly after a heart attack.
“In an ideal world, you treat a patient immediately when they’re having a heart attack to try to salvage some of the tissue and promote regeneration,” says Karen Christman, a bioengineer at the University of California, San Diego.
It appears to repair tissue damage and lessen inflammation immediately following a heart attack in rats and pigs
The creation of the biomaterial was motivated by Christman’s pursuit of this ideal, along with a group of researchers. According to a paper published on December 29 in Nature Biomedical Engineering by Christman and colleagues, it appears to repair tissue damage and lessen inflammation immediately following a heart attack in rats and pigs.
“I think it has a lot of potential,” Vimala Bharadwaj, a biomedical scientist at Stanford University who was not involved in the research. The paper “is definitely good proof of concept for what they’re trying to do.”
In the past, scientists discovered that stem cells obtained from body fat might be used to mend the heart, muscles, and bones (SN: 3/9/16). Christman was interested in working with the extracellular matrix, a network of proteins that supports the cells in heart muscle tissue structurally. It has to regenerate properties similar to stem cells but costs a lot less, she claims.
Christman’s team used components from this matrix to create a hydrogel in 2009. Trials on rats and then on people demonstrated that the substance adhered to damaged areas and encouraged cell growth and repair. However, because of the hydrogel’s relatively high particle size, it could only be injected into the heart by a needle.
“Poking the heart with a needle could set off an arrhythmia,” says Christman. To use this treatment, doctors would need to wait a few weeks until the heart is more stable and the chance of these irregular heartbeats decreases. And that would be too late to prevent scarring.
The group took the previously made hydrogel, used a centrifuge to separate out the larger particles, leaving only the nanoparticles, and then added water to thin the mixture. This resulted in a substance that was thin enough to be injected directly into heart blood arteries.
