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

Lots of advantages

[phorm]

I can think of lots of advantages with this, in hearts the big ones would be the lack of issues that ye ol' metallic pacemakers possibly have with strong electrical fields, really big magnets, etc.

And in other fields, if we can do this as an "add-on" for hearts, we could probably further the study and production of organic structures that would assist (or replace) other organs, without the nasty issues of rejection etc.

Heck, it might even be useful for guys with major impotency problems, perhaps a little section of implanted cells that sends a "wake up" signal... that's science that would likely sell, giving funding for further research into other more crtical (life saving) uses.

Re:Lots of advantages

[Cicero382]

"While I agree that this is promising technology, it seems as though it could only replace a traditional pacemaker in the case of AV node block (which is only one of the many heart problems that traditional pacemaker devices can treat)."

True. Reading from a (semi) professional point of view I was more excited about the use of myoblasts to construct the framework rather than its application per se. Though the change in function is pretty neat - essentially an artificial AV node! I was also happy to see a lack of the hype that often comes with this sort of announcement (FTFA "preliminary steps")

"I wish the scientists and doctors working on this project the best of luck. Hopefully if they can grow conductive tissue, they could also use it to repair dead tissue found in hearts that have suffered from a heart attack."

Sorry, not this way. This technique is really only for the generation of conductive tissue - not the heart muscle itself which is very different from skeletal muscle. Stem cells, anyone?

Re:This is awesome

[mgv]

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.

There are alot of reasons that this won't help as many people as you might think.

Mostly this is because pacemakers are now being used to do things which natural heart muscle cannot do anyway.

These technologies include:

Defibrillating (ie electric shock) a heart if it arrests.
Short bursts of fast pacing for hearts in certain fast rhythms.
Coordinated depolarisation of different parts of enlarged hearts to make all the walls of the heart contract at once. When hearts get injured they often get bigger, and biological conduction systems conduct too slowly for a large heart so the cardiac effort is wasted more as the heart gets bigger, making a bad system worse.

So, if your heart is otherwise normal and you just have a conduction problem, great - this might help.

On the other hand, hearts that need pacing usually aren't normal in lots of other ways, and in these areas just putting a small bit of "normal" tissue in won't give as much benefit as a pacemaker.

Michael

Re:This is awesome

[mykhailjw]

Oklahoma Heart Institute, Tulsa, OK - Dr. James A. Coman. Let me clearify (sorry a little irritated this morning). These tests can be done safely, but they need to be done with proper care. You need someone that can check the device (either pacemaker or defibrillator) for battery life and overall functionality. Not every doctor should do this but they should at least know enough to send their patients to someone that can and will. If your cardiologist says flat out that it can't be done then maybe it is time to find one that is a little more current on their stuff.