A team of scientists from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus has developed a patch for treating congenital heart defects in infants.

The team created a tissue-engineered myocardial patch via electrospinning, wherein electricity is applied to fluid solutions to produce nanofibers to form a scaffold, which is eventually injected with living cells that subsequently become the patch.

Source: University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

“The scaffold was found to be mechanically sufficient for heart wall repair,” the researchers explained. “Vascular cells were able to infiltrate more than halfway through the scaffold in static culture within three weeks.”

Ultimately, the goal is to produce lab-grown heart tissue using a patient’s own cells, thereby restructuring the heart to correct for defects.

According to the researchers, the new patch will be an improvement on current patches, which are composed of both non-living and non-degradable materials that do not grow with the patient and do not integrate with the heart, thus subsequently failing.

The new patch is detailed in the article, “An in vitro characterization of a PCL-fibrin scaffold for myocardial repair, which appears in the journal Materials Today.