A team of physicists, engineers, and materials science experts from Children’s Hospital Boston and the Masachusetss Institute of Technology (MIT) has cCombined cardiac muscle cells with tiny 30 nanometer-thick gold nanowiresto create innovatorsheart patches whose cells beat in unison, which could help repair the heart of patients who have suffered a heart attack.
“The heart is a fairly sophisticated piece of electrical equipment,” says Daniel Kohane, an MIT professor and co-author of the paper. “It is essential that all cells beat at the same time or the tissue will not function properly,” he adds. According to the researchers in the journalNature Nanotechnology In their September 25 issue, the experiments revealed that adding the finest gold strands to laboratory-grown heart tissue promotes communication between cells, so that they contract at the same time without the need to stimulate them with each beat. Now they are set to study whether the patches will work just as well on live animals.
In addition to the repercussions of the work in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases, the researchers suggest that the new technology could represent aleap in tissue engineering. “Other researchers could benefit from this idea by applying it to other muscle cells, other vascular structures, or perhaps even neuronal systems, because it is a simple way to improve the collective communication of cells”, has underlined the chemist Charles Lieber, of the Harvard University, after knowing the work.
