Preventing Heart Attack Using Magnetic fields

Overly-viscous blood can damage blood vessels and lead to heart attacks. Therefore, people who are at risk of heart attacks take medications such as Aspirin, in order to thin their blood. Such drugs can have unpleasant side effects, however, and can only be taken a certain number of times per day. Prof. Rongjia Tao, a physicist from Philadelphia's Temple University, now thinks he might have come up with a better way of thinning human blood - he subjects it to magnetic fields.

Tao had previously researched the use of magnetism for decreasing the viscosity of oil in engines and pipelines. Because blood contains iron, it turns out that it, too, becomes more fluid when magnetized.

In lab tests, Tao and Temple collaborator Ke "Colin" Huang subjected human blood samples to a magnetic field of 1.3 Telsa (roughly equivalent to an MRI) for approximately one minute. This polarized the red blood cells, which caused them to link together into short chains. These chains, because they are larger than single cells, tend to flow down the middle of blood vessels, instead of creating friction by moving against the inner walls. All told, he was able to decrease the viscosity of the samples by 20 to 30 percent.

The blood did return to its original viscosity once the magnetic field was removed, although it took several hours to do so. It is apparently safe to repeat the treatment over and over, however, as the function of the red blood cells does not appear to be affected.

"By selecting a suitable magnetic field strength and pulse duration, we will be able to control the size of the aggregated red-cell chains, hence to control the blood's viscosity," said Tao. "This method of magneto-rheology provides an effective way to control the blood viscosity within a selected range."

More work is required, although Tao hopes to ultimately make the treatment available as a preventative therapy.

The research is being published in the journal Physical Review E.

Source: Gizmag

Nanofiber patch could regenerate dead areas of heart

When someone has a heart attack, the cells in the affected area of the heart die off, and the damage can't be repaired. In the not-so-distant future, however, that may not be the case. Engineers from Rhode Island's Brown University, working with colleagues in India, have created a carbon nanofiber patch that has been shown to regenerate heart cells. It is hoped that such patches could eventually be placed on the heart, like a Band-Aid, to regrow dead areas.

The patch itself is 22 millimeters long, 15 microns thick, has a scaffold-like structure, and can expand and contract like heart tissue. It is made from a government-approved polymer and carbon nanofibers. The fibers are said to be excellent conductors of electrons, and so are able to transmit the electrical impulses that the heart uses in order to maintain a steady beat.

The Brown team laid the patch on a glass substrate, then seeded its nanofibers with heart cells known as cardiomyocytes. After four hours, five times as many cells had colonized the nanofiber patch, than a control patch that consisted of the polymer only. This figure rose to six times the cell density, after five days. Additionally, after four days, the density of neurons on the nanofiber patch had doubled.

According to the engineers, the elasticity of the scaffolding and the electrical qualities of the nanofibers are what makes it such an ideal spawning ground for the cardiomyocytes and neurons.

There is still work to be done, however. The team now wants to alter the pattern of the scaffolding in order to better mimic the heart's electrical current, along with placing a patch in a live subject to see how it handles the heart's voltage and beat regime. They also want to confirm that the cardiomyocytes which grow on the patch are able to function in the same ways as regular heart cells.

The research, which was conducted in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, was recently published in the journal Acta Biomaterialia.

Source: Gizmag

New Muscle Programming Method Uses DNA To Turn Blood Into Beating Heart Cells

Cardiomyocytes in the Sinoatrial Node This image shows a section of the sinoatrial node, a pacemaking area of the right atrium of the heart. The series of squiggly lines at bottom left, near the bulge, is a section of cardiomyocytes, which make the heart beat. Scientists at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions have figured out a new way to morph blood cells into this type of heart cell.Wikimedia Commons

A new DNA-based cell-transformation method could be a simpler, safer way to convert cells into beating heart cells, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. It involves no viruses and is a foolproof method to create cardiac cells that beat, they say.


Cardiac muscle cells, or cardiomyocytes, are what makes the heart beat. Scientists have been making cardiomyocytes from other cells for some time, usually by making induced pluripotent stem cells from some other cell, like skin cells or blood cells. The cells are reprogrammed into iPS cells by injecting virus particles that have been manipulated to carry genetic information.

But the viruses can cause mutations scientists don’t want, and in some cases, they cause cancer. It would be better to create new cells without involving viruses at all, but some scientists didn’t think this would be possible with heart muscle cells.

Cardiomyocytes are tricky to make in the lab, developing into clumps of regular, non-beating cells if they are not developed properly. Although plenty of labs have made them, there are no standardized recipes for the nutrient and growth factor broths that help them grow into properly beating cells.

Hopkins researchers went ahead and figured that out. Johns Hopkins postdoctoral scientist Paul Burridge pored through dozens of scientific papers and worked for nearly two years to develop a foolproof heart cell recipe. It worked for 11 different stem cell lines, including embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells.

“We took the recipe for this process from a complex minestrone to a simple miso soup,” said Elias Zambidis, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of oncology and pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering and the Kimmel Cancer Center.

To make the virus-free mutations, scientists used plasmids, which are ring-shaped molecules of double-stranded DNA that are separate from the DNA that’s found in chromosomes. They usually occur in bacteria, and can replicate inside cells but eventually degrade.

The team worked with stem cells from umbilical cord blood and gave them a slight shock, opening a gateway for a plasmid to insert seven genes into the cells. The plasmids caused the cells to turn into iPS cells. Then, Burridge fed them his specialized, simplified broth, designed to make them into heart cells. The researchers lowered oxygen levels to simulate the hypoxic environment these cells would experience when they grow inside an embryo. Nine days later, the nonviral iPS cells became functioning cardiac cells, according to Hopkins.

Such virus-free cells could eventually be used to test new cardiac drugs, or for stem cell-derived implants to help patients whose cardiomyocytes die in a heart attack, according to Hopkins.

Watch the cells pulse in the video below.

Source: Popsci