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Tissue engineering technology mends broken hearts
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Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) is a medical term that translates as heart muscle death or "heart attack" and claims more than one million lives every year according to the World Health Organization. AMI is caused by the cessation of blood supply to the myocardium (heart muscle) due to an arterial blockage. As a result, dehydrated cardiac tissue cells die. This process causes cardiomyopathy (disease of the myocondrial tissue) affecting the heart's pumping functioning ability which can cause fatality. The severity of cardiac tissue damage is contingent upon the length of time that blockage exists. The most effective treatment for this condition is emergency medical attention.
Other treatments include:
- Thrombolytic medication therapy
- Coronary angioplasty
- coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG)
- Stent placement
- Lipid therapy
- Diet and fitness
- Heart transplantation
Heart transplantation has been the most promising method to correct damaged cardiac tissue. However, the potentials for patients to receive this procedure is altered by donor availability and tendencies for transplantation success weigh heavily upon tissue rejection by the host's immune system.
Treatments offered for AMI have potential for dramatic improvement according to recent biomedical research findings. The introduction of tissue engineering has brought about the realization of tissue regenerative therapy by cardiac specialists around the world.
One such treatment was successfully preformed in 1994 by Dr. Beythien at the XCell Center in Düsseldorf, Germany. Dr. Beythien excised stem cells from his patient's hip bone marrow and then re-implanted the cells to damaged cardiac tissue via catheter therapy. "The patient's EF capacity climbed from 19% to 45-55% in just two treatments" and his quality of life was restored after a recorded 22 years.
In 2003, The American Heart Association published a Circulation Research article which descriptively discusses potential treatment for patients suffering cardiovascular diseases through tissue engineering. An exert from this article states that:
"New drugs and innovative devices have improved the quality of life for patients with cardiovascular disease, but have not neccesarily decreased morbidity or mortality. Successful treatment is limited in many situations by the lack of suitable autologous tissue to restore injured cardiac muscle."
According to The Department of Biomedical Engineering at The Whitaker Institute at John Hopkins, development of the tissue-engineered heart is a critical step towards understanding cell behavior.
Should the future of biomedical advancements in tissue engineering limit medical research applications to the use of only recipient produced stem cells?
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