Heart attacks and strokes triggered by electrical misfiring in the heart are among the biggest killers on the planet. Now, researchers have created a “liquid wire” that, when injected into pig hearts, can guide the organs to a normal rhythm.
, presented here this week at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, are “impressive and really cool,” says Thomas Mansell, a biomolecular engineer at Iowa State University who was not involved with the work. “It’s an exciting study,” agrees Usha Tedrow, a cardiac electrophysiologist at Harvard Medical School, also not involved in the work. If the findings translate to people, she says, it could save thousands of lives each year.
Medications and a procedure known as ablation therapy—in which some of the pacemaker cells are frozen or fried—can help. Other patients must have a defibrillator implanted. If the device detects arrhythmia, it sends a powerful electrical pulse to the top of the heart to shock the muscle back into normal rhythm. It can be painful. “Patients never know when they’ll be shocked,” says Elizabeth Cosgriff-Hernandez, a biomaterials engineer at the University of Texas, Austin.
In hopes of getting around this problem, Cosgriff-Hernandez and her colleagues set out to create a liquidlike gel they could inject throughout the length of a coronary vein. The gel would then rapidly harden into a conductive, flexible plastic. The researchers then fed both through an ultrathin divided catheter that keeps the liquids separate and inserted the catheter into a coronary vein at the top of the hearts of live pigs. The team pushed the liquids down the vein and its tributaries and removed the catheter. Once the two liquids met inside the vein, the compounds reacted within minutes and hardened into a flexible wire.
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