Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Children’s Hospital Boston, both in the United States, have built cardiac patches studded with gold nanowires that enhance electrical signaling between cells, a step toward better treatment for heart attack patients. The gold nanowires could be used to create pieces of tissue whose cells all beat in time, something existing cardiac patches have difficulty achieving. Daniel Kohane, a professor in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, said, “The heart is an electrically quite sophisticated piece of machinery. It is important that the cells beat together, or the tissue won’t function properly.” The team’s unique approach uses gold nanowires, which are scattered among cardiac cells, as they are grown in vitro. Biological engineers use miniature scaffolds to build new tissue, but traditional scaffolds have been made with materials with poor electrical conductivity – a problem for cardiac cells, which rely on electrical signals to coordinate their contraction. The team instead built a composite scaffold of gold nanowires and the base material alginate, and found that the range of signals conduction increased by three orders of magnitude. “It’s really night and day. The performance that the scaffolds have with these nanomaterials is just much, much better,” Kohane said. The team’s study was published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/gold-nanowire-heart-0926.html