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]

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

[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

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.

New Band Idea!

[Nefarious Wheel]

Cool -- now I can play rock & roll on stage without interference from the amplifier stacks. I can plot my rise to stardom right away!

How about -- "Geriatric and the Pacemakers"?

Re:New Band Idea!

[Ardeocalidus]

We have them... They're called the "Rolling Stones".

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

[I_Love_Pocky!]

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).

Essentially this technology would create an artificial bridge from the atrium to the ventricle, replacing the AV node. The AV node creates a delay between the signal propagation in the atrium to the ventricle which causes them to beat separately (the lub-lub sound you hear from your heart is atrium contracting, followed by ventricle). If this artificial replacement was not able to delay the signal properly it could lead to erratic heart rhythms (like the ventricle pumping at the same time as the atrium, which would severely diminish heart output).

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.

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?

FYI...

[distantbody]

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

Woah...

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally read that as "A Peacemaker made from your own cells".

And I was like, "WTF? How do you make a missile out of a phone?"

CRAP!

[plasmacutter]

now no excuse to avoid those magnet things in airports.. *hides bomb* ; )

this is just the beginning

[Magdalene]

im still waiting for the 'modified' version of the olympics, and any other sports in the future i was talking about ages ago, with this, and 'face implants' and artificial hips and everything, its going to be one hell of a show. .. I mean imagine FIFA 2223
.. and its brazil and england tied in the last seconds of the match with one of england's modded forwards down for repairs from that blown calf in the first half they are having a hard time keeping brazils top mod Peleisgod away from their nets and Omigod. with only seconds to go he has blown both of his ankles and is head has completely come away from his body .. . "thats the new mod they just let in for the 2222 practice runs that i was telling you about jorja.. if i may butt in". oh really Raymond? ohmygod seconds to go and his head actually reaches the ball at 30 feet and is it?.... it is!.... GOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!! !! BRAZIL HAS WON WITH JUST SECONDS TO GO AND THERE IS THE HORN the fans are going wild with exitement and that is the end of the world cup match for 2223 this year held in new brazil on coming to you live brodcast from the moon we thank all our listeners and sponsers and goodnite ... oh and such a disapointment for england..."

anyway... i digress. you get the idea.

Re:this is just the beginning

[William Robinson]

neither FIFA nor Olympic can happen in 2223. /nitpicking

Go, figure out;)

Re:this is just the beginning

[geoffspear]

20 years ago, you would have said that the Winter Olympics couldn't occur in 2006. You think your prediction for the dates of sporting events on 2 centuries will be more accurate?

Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

"The implants remained functional through the animals' lifespan"

Kind of obvious, isn't it?