Biocompatible Patch to Heal Infants with Birth Defects

Biocompatible patches to repair congenital heart defects are under development at Rice University and Texas Children's Hospital. About one in 125 babies born in the United States suffers such a defect. The patches are seeded with live cardiac cells and, after incubation, beat under their own power. The new scaffold is designed to support the growth of healthy new tissue and over time, it would degrade and leave a repaired heart.

Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] what we have here is a combination of some plastic materials and some biological materials that can be loaded with heart cells to make these spontaneously beating tiny pieces of heart tissue we feel that these can be used to repair congenital heart defects in infants and children with tissue that acts like the rest of the heart and will

00:00:33 continue to grow as as the heart grows and the child grows the current Technologies of repairing congenital heart defects and these as we call them full thickness defects whereas a whole in the Contracting heart tissue work very well in the short term but in the long term they greatly increase the risk of arrhythmias

00:00:58 of um heart failure and of sudden cardiac death we feel that by putting in a biological tissue we can have greater long-term outcomes also the tissue we're putting in is beating immediately on implantation and is conducting the the electrical signals that go across the heart we feel that this should give great better outcomes and better heart

00:01:28 function immediately and that using materials like this can allow surgeons to expand the types of therapies that they can do replacing areas of the heart that are very critical to heart function where it's absolutely necessary that they beat very quickly after surgery my vision of the laboratory I think this brings us closer to a a very long-term goal of being able

00:01:58 to construct an entire biological heart out of human cells and some artificial scaffolds and materials where we could in the laboratory grow a heart that then could be used as a transplant in a patient if it's a child that heart would continue to grow with the patient and and could really get around the issue of the the lack of availability of heart for heart transplants in the

00:02:32 United States