Tissue Engineering Used To Treat Congenital Heart Disease

Texas Children's Hospital in Houston recently announced that its Pediatric Cardiac Bioengineering Lab has been awarded almost a half a million dollars for their research in the causes of congenital heart disease and heart defects. They have been working on and researching the development of tissue engineering therapies using stem cells derived from human amniotic fluid. Dr. Jacot has studied the effects of substrate stiffness on maturing heart cells, the mechanical environment of cardiovascular tissues, and the development of the heart tissue grown from stem cells taken from the amniotic fluid of the patients' mothers. Their work is promising due to the fact that the regenerative therapies are grown from amniotic fluid-derived stem cells and are genetically identical to the child and have the potential to grow with the patient with minimal immune response. It is a hope that in the near future there will be living heart tissue available to reconstruct hearts with congenital defects.

I found this article interesting because it relates to the material we just finished covering in class as well as to our device design projects.

Source: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/216978.php

Aubrey Hildebrandt