A Pacemaker Made From Your Own Cells

FiReaNGeL writes to tell us that researchers at the Children's Hospital in Boston are on the road to crafting a pacemaker from living cells instead of an artificial implant. From the article: "When the engineered tissue was implanted into rats, between the right atrium and right ventricle, the implanted cells integrated with the surrounding heart tissue and electrically coupled to neighboring heart cells. Optical mapping of the heart showed that in nearly a third of the hearts, the engineered tissue had established an electrical conduction pathway, which disappeared when the implants were destroyed. The implants remained functional through the animals' lifespan (about 3 years)."

Comments

This is awesome

[Beached]

This will be a great help to those with actual pacemakers if they can use this. Currently if you have a pacemaker, diagnostic equipment like MRI are not available as the magnettic forces can move the wires and cause other weird things to happen.

Re:This is awesome

[mgv]

YOU CAN HAVE A MRI AS LONG AS YOUR CARDIOLOGIST IS NOT A DUMB ASS. Quit spreading this lie. I work for a Cardiac electrophysiologist and we do these every week. Yes there are some risks and the patient needs to be monitored but it can be done and it is safe.

I find this statement rather strange. I am fairly familiar with MRI - I have worked in MRI scanners regularly for a few years now and everyone down there is fairly aware of just what it means to have a couple of Tesla's of magnetic field strength means (Most are between 0.5 to about 3 Tesla's in strength). It will take a pen and accelerate it up enough to pull it through the donut and either stick to the wall of the magnet or fling it across the room. And the only metal bit in the pen is maybe the nib and the little spring that makes the pen click up an down.

Specifically, we don't let people with all sorts of metal in them go into the scanner. Pacemakers, aneurysm clips in their brains, and so on.

The risks of this to the if you go into a MRI with these sorts of things include:
1. Heating effects. The field is pulsing in enough energy to push alot of electrons into high spin orbitals and then read the energy as they relax (or so I understand - I'm no physicist). This is bad enough when you are just in the scanner for a while ( you can come out a little hot and sweaty in the more powerful magnets), but any coiling of wires (eg the non ferrous conducting carbon leads that we use to read the ECG/EKG) leads to a real risk of alot of heating. This would occur inside a person just as easily as outside.

2. Electrical effects. If you have a pacing wire inside you and you put it in a strong and changing magnetic field you will generate electrical currents. If this is on a pacing lead then they have a direct outlet onto your heart. This would not be a good thing.

3. Interference - pacing boxes would interfere strongly with any imaging near to them, so if they were near to the heart (which they usually are!) then it would be quite hard to image the heart.

4. Movement - a small pacing box probably wouldn't be enough to cause someone to stick to the walls of the magnet. Or then again, it might. I don't know, I've never tried. But it would certainly pull. this might not be good for the bits that screw into the wall of your heart.

All in all, while it is possible that I am the ignorant one here, I am very sceptical that any MRI unit would let someone with a pacemaker anywhere near the magnet. I know for a fact that nobody in our institution with a pacemaker gets anywhere near the magnet - patient or staff.

Would you care to name the institution that lets people with real pacemakers go into MRI units? I think some people might be quite interested in this..

Michael

FYI...

[distantbody]

...We ALL have pacemakers made from our own cells already...literally...See Cardiac pacemaker