PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] When you suffer a heart attack, a part of your heart dies. Nerve cells in the heart's wall and a special class of cells that spontaneously expand and contract keeping the heart beating in perfect synchronicity are lost forever. Surgeons can't repair the affected area. It's as if when confronted with a road riddled with potholes, you abandon what's there and build a new road instead.
Needless to say, this is a grossly inefficient way to treat arguably the single most important organ in the human body. The best approach would be to figure out how to resuscitate the deadened area, and in this quest, a group of researchers at Brown University and in India may have an answer.
The scientists turned to nanotechnology. In a lab, they built a scaffold-looking structure consisting of carbon nanofibers and a government-approved polymer. Tests showed the synthetic nanopatch regenerated natural heart tissue cells called cardiomyocytes as well as neurons. In short, the tests showed that a dead region of the heart can be brought back to life.
"This whole idea is to put something where dead tissue is to help regenerate it, so that you eventually have a healthy heart," said David Stout, a graduate student in the School of Engineering at Brown and the lead author of the paper published in Acta Biomaterialia.
The approach, if successful, would help millions of people. In 2009, some 785,000 Americans suffered a new heart attack linked to weakness caused by the scarred cardiac muscle from a previous heart attack, according to the American Heart Association. Just as ominously, a third of women and a fifth of men who have experienced a heart attack will have another one within six years, the researchers added, citing the American Heart Association.
What is unique about the experiments at Brown and at the India Institute of Technology Kanpur is the engineers employed carbon nanofibers, helica
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| Contact: Richard Lewis Richard_Lewis@brown.edu 401-863-3766 Brown University Source:Eurekalert |