Of all the body’s organs, the human heart is probably the one most primed for
performance and efficiency. Decade after decade, it continues
to pump blood around our bodies. However, this performance
optimisation comes at a high price: over the course of
evolution, almost all of the body’s own regeneration mechanisms
in the heart have become deactivated. As a result, a heart
attack is a very serious event for patients; dead cardiac cells
are irretrievably lost. The consequence of this is a permanent
deterioration in the heart’s pumping power and in the patient’s
quality of life.

In their attempt to develop a treatment for the repair of
cardiac tissue, scientists are pursuing the
aim of growing replacement tissue in the laboratory, which
could then be used to produce replacement patches for the
repair of damaged cardiac muscle. The reconstruction of a
three-dimensional structure poses a challenge here. Experiments
have already been carried out with many different materials
that could provide a scaffold substance for the loading of cardiac muscle cells.

“Whether natural or artificial in origin, all of the tested
fibres had serious disadvantages,” says Felix Engel, Research
Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung
Research in Bad Nauheim. “They were either too brittle, were
attacked by the immune system or did not enable the heart
muscle cells to adhere correctly to the fibres.” However, the
scientists have now found a possible solution in Kharagpur,
India.

At the university there, coin-sized disks are being produced
from the cocoon of the tasar silkworm (Antheraea mylitta). According to
Chinmoy Patra, an Indian scientist who now works in Engel’s
laboratory, the fibre produced by the tasar silkworm displays
several advantages over the other substances tested. “The
surface has protein structures that facilitate the adhesion of
heart muscle cells. It’s also coarser than other silk fibres.”
This is the reason why the muscle cells grow well on it and can
form a three-dimensional tissue structure. “The communication
between the cells was intact and they beat synchronously over a
period of 20 days, just like real heart muscle,” says Engel.

Despite these promising results, clinical application of the
fibre is not currently on the agenda. “Unlike in our study,
which we carried out using rat cells, the problem of obtaining
sufficient human cardiac cells as starting material has not yet
been solved,” says Engel. It is thought that the patient’s own
stem cells could be used as starting material to avoid
triggering an immune reaction. However, exactly how the
conversion of the stem cells into cardiac muscle cells works
remains a mystery.

More information: Chinmoy Patra, Sarmistha Talukdar,
Tatyana Novoyatleva, Siva R. Velagala, Christian Mühlfeld,
Banani Kundu, Subhas C. Kundu, Felix B. Engel
Silk protein fibroin from Antheraea mylitta for cardiac tissue
engineering, Biomaterials, Advance Online Publication
Januar 10, 2012

Provided by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (news : web)

Continue reading here:
Scientists use silk from the tasar silkworm as a scaffold for heart tissue

Comments are closed.