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Cardiac Patch for a Broken Heart
Roland Piquepaille writes "People who suffered from heart attacks or other heart failures often need transplants because their hearts are essentially non-functioning. But imagine what would happen if it was possible to engineer living heart tissues to fix these broken hearts? This is what bioengineers at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City are starting to make. According to HealthDay News, their patches for broken hearts are made of heart tissue grown in the lab. Right now, animal trials are just starting and it will take at least a decade before human trials begin. But when these living bandages are ready for cardiac care, they'll have the potential to save millions of lives in the world every year."
" from the.. bottom of my broken heart...~~~ there's just one thing i'd like you to know...
I prefer my patch for a broken heart. Glen Morangie.
..for my broken heart caused by my mean ex-girlfriend leaving me for another man?
No? Then forget it. Back to alcohol and chocolate for me.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
the heart will work again for a little bit, but other major organs that iteract with the heart will cease to function correctly, and the new patch will somehow allow the heart to be more vulnerable to viruses.
Or move to some other day to minimize heart attacks caused by 'patch overloading'?
There is a common, deliberate attempt to blur and hide the source of stem cells. Are they delivered from abortions or umbilical cords or from spinal cords?
e .html
Whether everyone else agrees or not, Catholics have strong objections to abortions and, thus, to any product derived from the tissues of aborted children. Thus there is a demand, froma Catholic perspective, and a refusal, from an anticatholic perspective, to differentiate cells derived from aborted babies.
on vaccines from aborted babies:
http://www.geocities.com/titus2birthing/VacProLif
http://www.cogforlife.org/fetalvaccinetruth.htm
http://www.physiciansforlife.ca/stemcells.html
www.priestsforlife.org
...patches will only be available on the first Tuesday of every month. Any severe heart attacks occuring between these so called "patch days" will have to wait.
This is all very interesting. If and when they do manage to come out with the cardiac patch I would suspect (as well as hope) that they would have patches to fix other tissue types (striated, smooth, etc).
I'm also wondering if it was possible to use cancer research to produce an anti-cancer... No I do not mean a cancer cure, but an infection of healthy living tissue. Is it possible to introduce healthy tissue into a body or system and have it spread in a cancer like fashion repairing everything in its path? That would be way too cool!
--Matt Wong
http://www.themindofmatthew.com
FINALLY, there's hope for Dick Cheney! Now if only they knew how to grow a brain for Georie.
...you were supposed to patch before an attack happened. I guess I was wrong.
My son's bladder was born on the outside - and needed it reversed. His surgeon at the time got to the point before putting it back in the body but then something happened: he moved on. However his new surgeon - Dr. Atala - is a guy renowned in the field for tissue re-engineering. My son's bladder is now back on the inside but one of the exciting things that is happening right now is that he has more of a chance of getting his bladder completely fixed out now than at any other time. His bladder is too small... and needs augmenting. The "traditional" way has been to augment the bladder with intestine tissue (often needing an extra channel for urine excretion), but Dr. Atala has managed to figure out how to augment the bladder - at least AFAIK in animals - with engineered tissue based on the original bladder. And the guy was attracted to our area to continue his research.
I'm excited about this growth area in medicine - not as a doctor or as a medical professional (sorry I am squeamish at blood) - but as a parent of a child who stands to benefit enormously from this kind of research. I hope and pray that this kind of stuff - patching hearts, augmenting bladders, mending broken organs in general - all develops and gets to the point of viability in time.
Mark.
Assuming this works, it would pave the way for other tissues to be potentially grown. If they can actually make lasting tissue for one of the hardest working organs in the body, I imagine they could easily make it for something else.
Start a fat and salt tax. If you serve more than 100 customers a day and your food is unhealthy charge the expected cost in healthcare that triple cheeseburger is going to cost in 30 years when that customer is just another fat ass with colon cancer.
Make cities walkable again, set off a portion of every downtown that people can walk around without the smell of diesel and gasoline in their nostrils on an otherwise fine day.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Currently people awaiting donors for hearts are assesed on age & how they live & will they benefit a heart.
I know there are a lot of people who live a good life & then suffer heart failure, but there is also a lot of people simply who simply live badly, they drink and smoke too much, eat too much & they don't exercise.
If there was a quick fix to heart problems, how many people would change their lives? Would they improve their quality of living or would they simply just resume their old ways & end up having to have the procedure again at the expense of the public health system.
Im all for ways of improving our chance of living through medicine, but there are a lot of people who bring upon these conditions because of their own lazyness & over-indulgence. Fixing their hearts won't nessesarily make them want to improve other area's of their life which created the heart problem in the beginning.
With medicine getting better & much more serious conditions being able to be fixed a lot easier, what are the social implications of this, humans are lazy, would it help create a society of people less concerned about their health? And what would that cost?
You mean like cylon/human hybrid blood?
I'll just stick with my lonely heart, thanks. I've heard that owning one of those is much better than owning a broken one.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Problem is, that's kind of what tumors already are -- normal tissues without the normal restriction on growth. (Yes, I realize that's a huge oversimplification. You don't need to explain why.) Almost by definition you can't beat cancer by adding new tissue to outcompete it.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
waiting on them to allow this procedure to be used.
My daughter was born eleven years ago needing a heart transplant. The four pediatric cardiologists in this state all argued over which of several procedures would be best, but in the end none of them would do a damn thing to help her because the AMA recommended against all of the procedures except a transplant. Legally the doctors could help her, but they were too afraid of the AMA. In the end, we had to do a transplant. That cost $225,000 for just the procedure plus about $45,000 in the following two years before she passed away. The AMA does a great job of screwing people over. They work very hard to make sure that people stay sick for a very long time to maximize the profit of their members. In the end she died of pulmonary edema. Basically she drowned in her own fluids. Again, the doctors wouldn't do what they could to save her. I had to listen to them whine about what the AMA recommends and what the AMA recommends against. In the end, her last stay in the ICU lasted 17 days and not a single doctor would do a thing. They just watched her die.
Without the AMA, we would have been able to find a doctor that would have helped her soon after she was born. I think that if the AMA had allowed her to start-off healthier, while she might not have lived much longer, she would have had a much happier life and been healthier and more active for a time.
Expect the AMA to fight against this with everything they have since it attacks the profit of their wealthiest members.
It's really amazing what doctors can do these days, and your son is very lucky to have such a qualified doctor. I can't even imagine the medical innovations that will occur in the next fifty years, and we'll all probably live much longer (and better) because of this.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
The big question is: can it be used to not only fix scarred tissue but also the issues of chronic heart diseases, for example enlarged hearts? There's many, many people with chronic diseases who urgently need some kind of replacement heart or way to fix them up as soon as possible.
I know somebody who is one of the leading psychologists researching compliance and quality of life pre-op and post-op of heart transplant patients. I also know many patients myself and hope this method will be able to help many of them.
Right now if your heart is "broken" transplantation is often your only chance to survive. The big issue as the article stated is the long time before a fitting heart is available to the patient and many people die on the waiting list. And I'm not talking about days or weeks - it can take some years before you get a new heart and even then it might be rejected by your body and will have to be removed.
Many patients will receive an artificial hart ( essentially a small pump inside of you with tubes leading to a small constantly ticking device outside of your body ). As cool as it might sound to geeks it's not too pleasant having to be near a power outlet all of the time or your heart might run out of battery. And because it's a mechanical device it also damages your blood cells. This is the best working method right now because before artificial hearts people had to endure living with a damaged heart for years, which is a very devastating experience ( imagine being out of breath for minutes because you just stood up from a chair ).
A lot of research has already gone into this and there are already many known possible methods ( for instance genetically modified pig hearts that could be implanted into humans ) any many new to come. What's really needed though is a working replacement for your heart made out of your own stem cells so people won't have rejection issues and have to take immunesuppressives for the rest of their lives making them prone to infections.
By the way, there's noting as satisfying as a 50 year old guy you got to know as a broken man who could hardly talk and being completely exhausted just from sitting showing you his new daughter with his wife who he impregnated shortly after his transplant. He had to wait for a new heart for way over a year and was very close to death but I'd say it was worth it.
:/- spoon(_).
Patching is for paranoids, I'd rather check out the bleeding edge release.
Isn't Rolan a man's name?
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
The patch will be made entirely of chocolate ice cream.
The male patch will consist of pornography and alcohol.
Ah, he's just upset that his "O" key is broken.
I had an old teacher who's had TWO artificial hearts. The first one was your standard pump driven noisemaker.
However, the pump mashes up the blood cells and was giving him anemia.
Soooo... They pulled it out and stuck in a new one. This artificial heart has a turbine in it to push the blood along. He no longer has a pulse, just a blood pressure.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I never thought science would find a cure for...
Oh. That kind of broken heart.
If you'll excuse me, I have some more crying to do.
As others pointed out, planting "healthy" tissue that outgrows cancer is just giving someone a worse cancer.
Wow, what a messed up /. story the day ater I found out that my gf has been cheating on me for months (no joke).
G-Force music visualization
> Right now, animal trials are just starting and it will
> take at least a decade before human trials begin. But
> when these living bandages are ready for cardiac care,
> they'll have the potential to save millions of lives
> in the world every year.
While I can see engineering taking awhile to develop something useful to humans, keep in mind that every year delayed "proving it" to arrogant government officials kills millions a year. Now explain to me why exactly they are a friend to humanity again?
One good cure for something like this, that's delayed a few years, delayed because of FDA-type bureaucracy will slaugter more people than all those the FDA "protects", even allowing for the wildest, slobbering socialist evils-of-corporations fantasies put together over the last 5 decades .
But it feels good, I guess, so that isn't actually happening. Couldn't be.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Growing heart tissue would be much more demanding requring "exercising" the muscle, plus as the article pointed out there are problems of tissue acceptance, adhesion and syncing the pulse of the muscle patch to the existing heart tissue. Given these hurtles it looks like this technology has many hurtles to jump.
Pursuing an interest in Dictyostelium amoebae provides an starting point to studying chemotaxis and cellular communication.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Make people responsible for their own lives. Make people deal with the consequences. But having the government take money from people to then pay it out on their behalf later makes no sense.
Because
1) it just won't be there for them anyway, and
2) people then expect to be taken care of.
That in no way encourages responsibility.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Apparently, they'll finally have an answer to their long-unanswered question, "How can you mend a broken heart."
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
That's what I get for messing with the threshhold selector. Everytime I do that, I end up ripping on some asshat, and get myself modded down for my trouble. :(
Quick, someone had better tell them there is hope.
atp-get dist-upgrade. Upgrades all the other body parts too.
Can't they aready patch hearts?
My brother like most people with down syndrome was born with a hole in his heart, the doctors used some wierd material to patch it, they seemed quite good at it scince the doctor had also done a girl born with down syndrome a few hours earlier.
I don't preview or spellcheck.
Think in terms of reality for a moment.
Who cares how lethal it really is when you can make money from suckers who'll buy it?
This really strikes me as an exciting breakthrough. I had heart surgery back in 1984 to repair a hole between my ventricles that drastically increased the viability of my life. Aside from having my ribs stapled together, I have a Dacron (a type of polyester) patch in my heart because the hole was too large to simply sew shut. Aside from basically being in good health since then, I'm always afraid that the growth of my heart in the intervening years is unduly stressing the patch; I was only seven when I underwent the surgery. I've always wondered if I could have my heart repaired properly; what it would mean to my energy levels, strength and peace of mind.
The real question is, could they grow a proper heart or replacement pieces from my genes at all? I had six major life-threatening heart defects that were mostly corrected, but there's always that lingering feeling that things could be better. If not for the surgery, I'm sure I'd be dead by now. Hell, I almost didn't make it past two months. Would something like this work for me? Would it be worth going back in there to complete the repairs?
Who knows. But I have to say this is definitely a thought-provoking piece of information. Unlike people who undergo heart-surgery in their later years, I never had a fully functional heart. Ah, the possibilities!
For those keeping score, this should sate your curiosity:
1. Faulty aortal valve: mostly corrected, slight murmur remains
2. Transposed position (It leans right instead of left): uncorrected
3. Half expected size: repairs later encouraged growth
4. Unknown muscle-tissue grown over heart: removed
5. Large hole between ventricles: covered with Dacron patch
6. Two small holes between atria: sewn shut
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
I'm holding out for weight management service pack.
We have an answer to the question posed by the Bee Gees years ago.
(Seriously... this is great news. I hope it works.)
Great news! Another double Quarter-Pounder, please. Extra cheese and bacon.
Why did the catholic priest go to Macy's on saturday?
He heard that boy's pants were half off.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
His homepage link is ref=nofollow'd. So you don't really have a reason to bitch anymore.
That's what they're doing.
.. just as natural as the development of language and teamwork ability.
Natural selection, we are enabling our species to maximize its population and survive regardless of obstacles. That way we can benefit from intellectual contributions of everyone (even those who may have a physical problem). Plus, we also want any good genes the person may have (for example, maybe the person has a bad heart, but maybe they also have an awesome improved kidney gene).
In a couple generations we may be able to do gene therapy and eliminate any detrimental genes.
So yes, our curing people of medical conditions is part of nature
This is a very good idea and autografts (tissue grafts made from the patients' own cells) have been used to replace skin on burn patients for some time. However, I see a few issues that need to be addressed:
1. Proper muscle function. If the cardiac patch grows and replaces the dead tissue, it will not do much good if the muscle doesn't contract and pump blood like real tissue does.
2. Scarring. The heart would have a large amount of scarring from where the ischemic tissue was removed. Also, the graft would need to integrate into the cardiac muscle around it and that results in scarring also. The scarring could impair proper functioning.
3. Integration time and materials strength. The graft would need to be implanted into the heart and it must not leak or come loose from the first minute the heart is re-started. Sutures would likely not be enough to keep the heart from leaking blood around the graft and leading to congestive heart failure. Maybe a mesh patch material as they use for artificial blood vessels would need to be used to provide a seal to keep the heart from leaking blood AND as a framework to allow tissue integration. But those have their own problems...
Once those issues get solved, I think the rest is smooth sailing. It will be very difficult to solve, but I am convinced that the world's biomedical engineers will find a solution.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
Or, consider harvesting and preserving stem cells in a personal cell library so in the future if the need arises, somethign can be grown in years preparation to solve an anticipated degeneration, expensive however; but not out of reach.
I recently attended a talk about longetivity of humanity-- in particular about finding logetivity genes. One of the figures that was presented was on the average lifespan given per year. Since the late 1800's or so, every 10 years, the average lifespan increases by 2 1/2 years. It's a linear relationship that hasn't shown signs of slowing.
Not as impressive as the doubling of chip speeds, but when you think about it, the average person born today is going to live about 20 years longer than the people that were dying when they was born.
Some of these breakthroughs have been in the prevention of late term deaths, etc (I think the majority has been in lowering infant mortality). One of the problems I see is that we are living longer, but our metabolic rates are still at the same rate. The longer lifespan is starting to push back the age of marriage, and children. Unfortunately, our biological clocks are still set for a 25 and younger childbirth. While increasing the average lifespan is great, I think we need to actually start focusing on improving the quality of life before we end up with 1/2 our population in wheel chairs and wearing diapers far beyond their time because medicine is keeping them alive.
Still, it's just a muscle, if an unusual one.
My personal suspicion is that the people they try this on will generally shortly die of strokes, or it will work. When an unusual heart treatment doesn't work it usually causes strokes.
Only those of us who can afford it.
-bugg
because it's not like the world is already vastly overpopulated... Go ahead, figure out ways to make the problem worse by eliminating natural selection and the natural pace of death from the equation.
[Ellen Heber-Katz at the Wistar Institute http://www.wistar.org/research_facilities/heberkat z/research.htm%5D has been using gene therapy to develop mice that can repair their own hearts and even grow new limbs if they are cut off. This is a biggie..
... or we simply stop eating the trash that lets us get heart attacks in the first place!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I agree wholeheartedly. My son was born w/2 heart defects and developed a third just recently. The first two are issues with his valves (aortic valve being the more serious). The next one is Wolf-Parkinson-White syndrome - an electrical problem. We haven't had to move forward with any types of surgeries for any of the issues, but one of the things that they could do if they have to move forward is replace his valve with an artifical valve. He is only 22 months old right now, so valve replacements would need to be frequent as he grows.
;)
The fact that they're working on this gives me faith that we could someday be looking at valve replacement surgery with a living tissue valve that would grow along with my son. Even if he has to have an aritifical valve implanted at some point before this is ready, it sounds like we're working towards being able to replace artificial valves with living tissue. That would be ideal. We (humans) are pretty good at engineering things, but I'd prefer to trust natural engineering
Best of luck with your child.
Lets hope what you propose never happens again. Because if it does I'd want you to get heart disease and see just how hard it will be for you to fork out $1mil for the transplant and treatments. You're saying we should not be allowed to smoke anywhere but on private property, then you are preety stupid.
Firstly with such a law passed, this decreases "freedom". With smoking out of the picture in public places eventually more things will become illegal and with time this world will turn into a dystopia, where everything is wrong.
You should know that it is in the best interest of everybody for people to smoke in public places. Simply because it increases profits. Here in Australia they tried banning smoking in certain areas of clubs and those areas were always EMPTY. Most if not all clubs have reverted back to complete smoking environments. Its only a few tree hugging hippies and fascists like yourself that cause a stir in a perfectly functional society (be it not perfect).
Never judge a book by its cover
Would a Catholic go for an post-partum (WAYY post partum) aborted pig's heart valve or mechanical valve?
Actually, PETA and various other animal rights people are against all transplants that use animal parts. No joke.
They are against experimentation on animals. They say that people like the scientists in this article are murderers.
I wonder what they thought in the 1980s about the insulin (then obtained by the slaughter of pigs) which kept tens of thousands of people with diabetes alive.
Are these delta patches? Will I need to completely remove my original heart, and then fully install an artificial and then apply the patches, or will the patches work with my original install? Is there going to be any DRM content in the patch base, or do I get the source code with it? Grrrr.. it's enough to give one a heart attack - gah!! Circular reasoning with recursi- *doh*...*thump*...
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Once capitalism takes hold, and these broken-heart patches become available to the public, they will probably be more expensive than the average working person would be able to afford. I hope I'm wrong, but something tells me that I probably won't be.
I have a friend who moved to Canada last year, and he has been telling me stories about the health system up there. Basically health coverage is provided by the government at no charge to the patient. I don't know all of the details, but he told me he was in and out of a basic procedure that would normally cost $200-$500 here in the US, but he paid nothing, and didn't really have to wait that long.
And they said zombies weren't real!
Would something like this work for me?
As a stem cell biologist - yes, in theory (in practise it'll take a bit of work yet - sorry!)(maybe not too much longer though, keep your fingers crossed). Two levels to look at - the cell types, and the overall structure. You seem to be able to make all the correct cell types (otherwise I doubt you'd be alive at all) but had a problem assembling them perfectly (again the fact that you are alive at all suggests a relatively minor problem considering the possibilities). This could be genetic or there could be other reasons (environmental i.e. a burst of pollutants released nearby at a critical time, who knows). If you can make the cell types, in a patching process the structure is controlled artificially, so you shouldn't be any more difficult to patch than anyone else. Where you might encounter difficulties is if you tried to grow an entire replicate heart in culture - but we can't do that for anyone yet anyways. By the time we can, there may well be protocols (growth factors etc) to avoid whatever caused your problems, even if it is genetic.
'luck! Tell all your friends to support all types of stem cell research, you can never predict where the breakthroughs will come from.
I wish we'd be more honest with ourselves. I'm going to die, and I know it. If I don't die of a heart attack, maybe I'll get cancer. Money spent on helping a retiree get two more marginal, high cost years might, perhaps, be better spent elsewhere -- maybe on poor children?
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
But if we do not allow discrimination due to the source of something, how can we then, say, boycott diamonds mined by slaves or near-slaves in Africa from DeBeers, vs. those mined in Canada by people who are not put in mortal danger for a non-scarce commodity. Or avoid beef that might reasonably be tainted by BSE (mad cow disease), etc. etc. etc.
Thus, I don't think you can make some hard and fast rule that discrimination is always wrong. After all, ALL choices are a matter of discrimination under the original (and apparently, nearly-lost) sense of the word. To discriminate is to choose, but not all choices are right--certainly, to discriminate against someone based on race is wrong, for example.
Therefore, let us examine the motives: Catholics would have us avoid those cells because they believe (and even if they are wrong, they DO believe) that they come from an act of murder. Racists, on the other hand, simply hate those of other races. Thus, one is motivated from care for another (even if many believe that to be misguided), whereas the others are motivated by irrational hatred.
Of the two motives, you have to admit that one is more worthy than the other, do you not? Or must we ascribe other motives to delegitimize those we might disagree with?
Interesting you should mention bladders. About 5 years ago I saw a TV program , "Tomorrow's World", which demonstrated a human badder grown in a petri-dish; this was a follow on feature from the human-mouse-on-an-ear thing.
My mother-in-law had one of her heart valves repaired in open heart surgery a few years ago. I was amazed. They said that if they couldn't sew it back together, that they would put in a pig's valve, with somewhat higher risk factors.
Makes you want to live near a hospital. See? City living is healthier after all!
-- Stephen.