Toward fixing damaged hearts through tissue engineering
Wednesday, January 22, 2014 - 14:02
in Health & Medicine
In the U.S., someone suffers a heart attack every 34 seconds—their heart is starved of oxygen and suffers irreparable damage. Engineering new heart tissue in the laboratory that could eventually be implanted into patients could help, and scientists are reporting a promising approach tested with rat cells. They published their results on growing cardiac muscle using a scaffold containing carbon nanofibers in the ACS journal Biomacromolecules.