Hydrogel patch designed to prevent left ventricle remodelling

Scientists and engineers at China’s Soochow and Fudan Universities and Brown University in the US have developed a cheap, non-toxic adhesive hydrogel patch made from food starch that is designed to be placed straight onto the heart to prevent left ventricle remodelling after a heart attack, minimising the damage caused to the heart. The hydrogel has fluid properties up to a certain amount of stress, at which point it solidifies and becomes stiffer, providing the ideal level of support for the heart. Human trials have not yet started, but biochemical markers showed that the patch reduced cell death, scar tissue accumulation and oxidative stress in tissue damaged by heart attack in rats.
Huajian Gao, a professor of engineering at Brown, and a co-author on the paper, said: “Part of the reason that it’s hard for the heart to recover after a heart attack is that it has to keep pumping. The idea here is to provide mechanical support for damaged tissue, which hopefully gives it a chance to heal. If the material is too hard or stiff, then you could confine the movement of the heart so that it can’t expand to the volume it needs to, but if the material is too soft, then it won’t provide enough support. So we needed some mechanical principles to guide us. It remains to be seen if it will work in humans, but it’s very promising. We don’t see any reason right now that it wouldn’t work.”