After someone has a heart attack, their body replaces damaged heart muscle tissue with non-beating scar tissue, impairing the heart’s function. .
This material is developed by a team led by Professor Karen Christman of the University of California, San Diego.
In 2012, Christman and colleagues created a hydrogel designed to be injected directly into damaged areas of the heart. It then forms a three-dimensional scaffold-like structure in which heart cells can grow, eventually forming functional myocardial tissue in place of scar tissue.
One problem with this version of the hydrogel was the fact that it could not be injected into the heart until at least a week after the attack had occurred.
To circumvent that limitation, scientists recently set out to modify the material so that it could be administered either intravenously or via injection into the blood vessels leading to the heart shortly after a heart attack occurs.
These changes included making individual particles much smaller. The idea was that this would allow it to pass through the tiny gaps between cells in the walls of the heart’s blood vessels, allowing it to penetrate damaged heart tissue. , is a form of heart attack damage as well.
However, when the injectable biomaterial was tested in rats and pigs, the particles bound Endothelial cells close the gaps between them. That said, this was still a good thing as the damaged blood vessels started to heal faster.
As a result, normal blood flow to myocardial tissue was restored faster and there was less inflammation. Generally speaking, the less inflammation there is at the wound site, the less scar tissue will form. Further rat experiments have shown that biomaterial particles can also be used to treat traumatic brain injury and pulmonary arterial hypertension.
“This biomaterial allows us to heal damaged tissue from the inside,” said Christman. “This is a new approach to regeneration engineering.”
A paper on this study was recently published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.
Source: University of California, San Diego
