New concept for myocardial implants Cell therapy and tissue engineering are emerging as novel therapeutic paradigms for heart muscle repair. This new approach is based on an increased number of heart muscle cells, cardiomyocytes, within the diseased area. Health © Thinkstock One strategy currently available involves the combination of cells with polymeric scaffolds ex vivo to generate an implantconstruct. This is then grafted onto the heart muscle. However, these procedures are hampered by the limited direct functional integration of grafted cells and high degree of donor cell death following cell grafting in host myocardial tissue. The EU funded 4-year 'Nanopatterned scaffolds for active myocardial implants' (NANOCARD) project is supporting work in this field through a consortium of 11 corporate and academic partners. NANOCARD aims to create a new concept for implant design.Overall the development is based on high-throughput screens (HTS) to identify specific extracellular matrix (ECM) materials. This is followed by in vitro tests for the recruitment of cells and cardiac tissue formation, and in vivo (animal) testing of implants. NANOCARD successfully developed and implemented HTS and identified ECM components that resulted in the most efficient recruitment of endothelial and myocardial cells. Researchers found that the optimal condition for the formation of vessels is low fibrin concentration (7.5 mg/ml) and high cell density. Scaffolds were implanted into a rat heart after the induction of myocardial infarction. There was no indication of cardiac or systemic toxicity of the implanted scaffolds. However, no positive effect was seen on cardiac function. An important impact of NANOCARD lies is in the evaluation of new technologies and the generation of data for future efforts in the development of functional myocardial implants.
