Last year, cardiologists at Boston Children’s Hospital reported developing a groundbreaking adhesive patch for sealing holes in the heart. The patch guides the heart’s own tissue to grow over it, forming an organic bridge. Once the hole is sealed, the biodegradable patch dissolves, leaving no foreign material in the body.
As revolutionary as this device was, it still had one major drawback: implanting the patch required highly invasive open-heart surgery. But that may be about to change.
Researchers from the Wyss Institute, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Boston Children’s have jointly designed a radically different way to implant the patch without having to stop the heart, place patients on bypass or cut open their chests.
They created a flexible, UV light-guided catheter that can be inserted through a vein in the rib cage, and from there directed to the defect within the beating heart. Two positioning balloons, one on either side of the hole, open when the catheter is fully in place. One of the balloon’s surfaces has a mirror-reflecting quality that reveals areas of the heart that would otherwise be difficult to see without more invasive tactics.
After releasing the patch, the surgeon turns on the catheter’s UV light, which activates the patch’s adhesive coating. The two balloons are then deflated and withdrawn.
The new catheter/patch combo has been successfully used to close ventricular septal defects in animals both large and small. In the September 23rd issue of Science Translational Medicine, the research team reported successful patch placement in a live pig model—a major step towards demonstrating that the tool may work on a beating human heart without requiring bypass and open-heart surgery.
Read the full post on Vector: Minimally invasive tool uses light for beating-heart repairs
The opinions expressed in this blog post are the author’s only and do not necessarily reflect those of MassDevice.com or its employees.
The post Fixing your heart with light appeared first on MassDevice.
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