A Pacemaker Made From Your Own Cells 54
FiReaNGeL writes to tell us that researchers at the Children's Hospital in Boston are on the road to crafting a pacemaker from living cells instead of an artificial implant. From the article: "When the engineered tissue was implanted into rats, between the right atrium and right ventricle, the implanted cells integrated with the surrounding heart tissue and electrically coupled to neighboring heart cells. Optical mapping of the heart showed that in nearly a third of the hearts, the engineered tissue had established an electrical conduction pathway, which disappeared when the implants were destroyed. The implants remained functional through the animals' lifespan (about 3 years)."
This is awesome (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is awesome (Score:1)
More like rip the implant out of the body!
-:sigma.SB
Re:This is awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
There are alot of reasons that this won't help as many people as you might think.
Mostly this is because pacemakers are now being used to do things which natural heart muscle cannot do anyway.
These technologies include:
Defibrillating (ie electric shock) a heart if it arrests.
Short bursts of fast pacing for hearts in certain fast rhythms.
Coordinated depolarisation of different parts of enlarged hearts to make all the walls of the heart contract at once. When hearts get injured they often get bigger, and biological conduction systems conduct too slowly for a large heart so the cardiac effort is wasted more as the heart gets bigger, making a bad system worse.
So, if your heart is otherwise normal and you just have a conduction problem, great - this might help.
On the other hand, hearts that need pacing usually aren't normal in lots of other ways, and in these areas just putting a small bit of "normal" tissue in won't give as much benefit as a pacemaker.
Michael
Re:This is awesome (Score:5, Informative)
I find this statement rather strange. I am fairly familiar with MRI - I have worked in MRI scanners regularly for a few years now and everyone down there is fairly aware of just what it means to have a couple of Tesla's of magnetic field strength means (Most are between 0.5 to about 3 Tesla's in strength). It will take a pen and accelerate it up enough to pull it through the donut and either stick to the wall of the magnet or fling it across the room. And the only metal bit in the pen is maybe the nib and the little spring that makes the pen click up an down.
Specifically, we don't let people with all sorts of metal in them go into the scanner. Pacemakers, aneurysm clips in their brains, and so on.
The risks of this to the if you go into a MRI with these sorts of things include:
1. Heating effects. The field is pulsing in enough energy to push alot of electrons into high spin orbitals and then read the energy as they relax (or so I understand - I'm no physicist). This is bad enough when you are just in the scanner for a while ( you can come out a little hot and sweaty in the more powerful magnets), but any coiling of wires (eg the non ferrous conducting carbon leads that we use to read the ECG/EKG) leads to a real risk of alot of heating. This would occur inside a person just as easily as outside.
2. Electrical effects. If you have a pacing wire inside you and you put it in a strong and changing magnetic field you will generate electrical currents. If this is on a pacing lead then they have a direct outlet onto your heart. This would not be a good thing.
3. Interference - pacing boxes would interfere strongly with any imaging near to them, so if they were near to the heart (which they usually are!) then it would be quite hard to image the heart.
4. Movement - a small pacing box probably wouldn't be enough to cause someone to stick to the walls of the magnet. Or then again, it might. I don't know, I've never tried. But it would certainly pull. this might not be good for the bits that screw into the wall of your heart.
All in all, while it is possible that I am the ignorant one here, I am very sceptical that any MRI unit would let someone with a pacemaker anywhere near the magnet. I know for a fact that nobody in our institution with a pacemaker gets anywhere near the magnet - patient or staff.
Would you care to name the institution that lets people with real pacemakers go into MRI units? I think some people might be quite interested in this..
Michael
Re:This is awesome (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is awesome (Score:2)
Interesting. What sort of MRI are you doing with people
Re:This is awesome (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This is awesome (Score:2)
Michael
Re:This is awesome (Score:2)
Indeed. There are plenty of metals that are good conductors that aren't affected significantly by magnetic fiedls---gold, silver.... Of course, I would note that even in non-ferrous metals, magnetic fields induces current (which probably explains the programming problems).
BTW, if the magnetic field were strong enough to suck a metal box through the walls of your chest, I'd hate to think what it would do to your blood cells. :-D
Re:This is awesome (Score:2)
Think about how elemental iron will be attracted to a magnet, but rust is not. It's a similar situation.
New Band Idea! (Score:5, Funny)
How about -- "Geriatric and the Pacemakers"?
Re:New Band Idea! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:New Band Idea! (Score:2)
Modification? (Score:2)
Of course any theraputic program like this will be first used to fix damaged tissue, but give it thirty to fifty years and see what it grows into (without saying whether it's good or bad).
Lots of advantages (Score:5, Interesting)
And in other fields, if we can do this as an "add-on" for hearts, we could probably further the study and production of organic structures that would assist (or replace) other organs, without the nasty issues of rejection etc.
Heck, it might even be useful for guys with major impotency problems, perhaps a little section of implanted cells that sends a "wake up" signal... that's science that would likely sell, giving funding for further research into other more crtical (life saving) uses.
Re:Lots of advantages (Score:5, Insightful)
Essentially this technology would create an artificial bridge from the atrium to the ventricle, replacing the AV node. The AV node creates a delay between the signal propagation in the atrium to the ventricle which causes them to beat separately (the lub-lub sound you hear from your heart is atrium contracting, followed by ventricle). If this artificial replacement was not able to delay the signal properly it could lead to erratic heart rhythms (like the ventricle pumping at the same time as the atrium, which would severely diminish heart output).
I wish the scientists and doctors working on this project the best of luck. Hopefully if they can grow conductive tissue, they could also use it to repair dead tissue found in hearts that have suffered from a heart attack.
Re:Lots of advantages (Score:5, Interesting)
True. Reading from a (semi) professional point of view I was more excited about the use of myoblasts to construct the framework rather than its application per se. Though the change in function is pretty neat - essentially an artificial AV node! I was also happy to see a lack of the hype that often comes with this sort of announcement (FTFA "preliminary steps")
"I wish the scientists and doctors working on this project the best of luck. Hopefully if they can grow conductive tissue, they could also use it to repair dead tissue found in hearts that have suffered from a heart attack."
Sorry, not this way. This technique is really only for the generation of conductive tissue - not the heart muscle itself which is very different from skeletal muscle. Stem cells, anyone?
Re:Lots of advantages (Score:2, Informative)
FYI... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:FYI... (Score:2, Informative)
I should know. I have regular heart palpitations. :(
Re:FYI... (Score:1)
For those too lazy to go through the registration: (Score:2, Informative)
Woah... (Score:5, Funny)
And I was like, "WTF? How do you make a missile out of a phone?"
Re:Woah... (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Woah... (Score:2)
How is WIELDING a pacemaker going to help them? (Score:2)
CRAP! (Score:3, Funny)
this is just the beginning (Score:5, Funny)
anyway... i digress. you get the idea.
Re:this is just the beginning (Score:1)
Don't count england out of the game just yet, when the mod's come it will be them and the Korean's, Brazil is only in becase they recieved a lot of tech help from Japan in 2222 Mod try outs.
(Maggie Starts a Fifa war on slashdot)*grin* and besides, i never watch american brodcasts of fifa, only the european multicasts will do.
techgoddess m
Re:this is just the beginning (Score:3, Funny)
Go, figure out;)
Re:this is just the beginning (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmmm.. (Score:1)
Aha... They are doing plastic surgery on heart..
Whenever I see the word ventricle (Score:1, Funny)
Duh (Score:4, Funny)
Kind of obvious, isn't it?
Not quite a "pacemaker" (Score:3, Informative)
In all these cases, you need an electrical pacemaker-- adding conductions cells is unlikely to do anything.
"From Your Own Cells" (Score:1)