HOUSTON – A bioengineer, Jeffrey Jacot, who works with Texas Children’s Hospital and Rice University, won a grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a patch to repair an infant's damaged heart.
About 10,000 babies born every year are in need of surgery to repair a hole in the heart or artery.
The new patch that goes inside the heart would allow for the infant to grow its own tissue through stem cells that would invade, regenerate and eventually leave the body.
The stem cells are taken from readily available amniotic stem cells from a newborn's own mother.
“It’s taken out from the fluid surrounding the fetus before a baby is born with a heart defect,” Jacot said. “Cells from the amniotic fluid are genetically matched to the fetus, so it would be the infant’s own cells, so there wouldn't be a chance of rejection.”
Right now, medical experts use cell-free patches to repair babies' hearts, but they neither degrade nor grow with the infant and often need to be replaced.
It might be years before this is available to patients, but it is expected to improve the survival rates of infants.
“So we make the right environment, get the right type of stem cells and grow heart tissue, and then once you put that in to repair the heart, it would grow with the patient and ideally would be indistinguishable from the rest of the heart, so you get a complete repair,” Jacot said.
Jacot said the development may also lead to other discoveries that could help heart patients.