Nanowired three dimensional cardiac patches

By Tal Dvir, Brian P. Timko, Mark D. Brigham, S. R. Naik, S. Karajanagi, O. Levy, Hongwei Jin, Kevin Kit Parker, Robert Langer, Daniel S. Kohane. Nature Nanotechnology, 2011

707 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Engineered cardiac patches for treating damaged heart tissues after a heart attack are normally produced by seeding heart cells within three-dimensional porous biomaterial scaffolds. These biomaterials, which are usually made of either biological polymers such as alginate or synthetic polymers such as poly(lactic acid) (PLA), help cells organize into functioning tissues, but poor conductivity of these materials limits the ability of the patch to contract strongly as a unit. Here, we show that incorporating gold nanowires within alginate scaffolds can bridge the electrically resistant pore walls of alginate and improve electrical communication between adjacent cardiac cells. Tissues grown on these composite matrices were thicker and better aligned than those grown on pristine alginate and when electrically stimulated, the cells in these tissues contracted synchronously. Furthermore, higher levels of the proteins involved in muscle contraction and electrical coupling are detected in the composite matrices. It is expected that the integration of conducting nanowires within three-dimensional scaffolds may improve the therapeutic value of current cardiac patches.

Subfields: Biomaterials, Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Surgery

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a272a6e7a6db024094bb4b5e32d2e8ac77bea007

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Ali Khademhosseini

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Citations in the corpus

Nanocomposite hydrogels for biomedical applications (2013, background): “In a recent attempt, researchers incorporated Au nanowires within macroporous alginate hydrogels to enhance the electrical conductivity of the polymeric network (Dvir et al., 2011).”
Biology-inspired Microphysiological System Approaches to Solve the Prediction Dilemma of Substance Testing (2016, positive): “…relevant for lung, bone and cartilage, and microelectrodes for the electrical stimulation and readout of muscle tissue (Ahadian et al., 2012; Dvir et al., 2012) or stimulation of cardiac cells or neurons (Bussek et al., 2009; Gramowski et al., 2011; Himmel et al., 2012; Johnstone et al.,…”
Carbon-Nanotube-Embedded Hydrogel Sheets for Engineering Cardiac Constructs and Bioactuators (2013, positive): “Furthermore, the evidently strong cell CNT interactions will allow the conductive CNT networks to be embedded into engineered tissues after the degradation of the gelatin matrix.(7,27,29)”
Graphene-based materials for tissue engineering (2016, background): “To engineer electrically conductive materials, researchers have doped biomaterials with electrically conductive nanomaterials such as gold and carbon-based nanoparticles [90].”