Podcast: The Patch That Can Heal a Broken Heart (Literally)

In this episode, we cover ETH Zurich’s biodegradable heart patch that combines 3D printing, living heart cells, and smart materials to seal and heal damaged heart tissue - paving the way for true cardiac regeneration after heart attacks.

This podcast is sponsored by Mouser Electronics. 

Episode Notes

(5:00) – A Patch for the Heart

This episode was brought to you by Mouser, our favorite place to get electronics parts for any project, whether it be a hobby at home or a prototype for work. Click HERE to learn more about advances of 3D printing in the medical space. 

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Transcript

Miley Cyrus famously said that nothing breaks like a heart. And though she's not wrong, well, some of these researchers at ETH Zurich think that they might know how to fix it. Actually, they might know how to fix it with the 3D printed patch. So, if that's got you excited, or you want to find out how Miley Cyrus might be wrong, well then, get ready. Let's get into it.

What's up friends, this is The Next Byte Podcast where one gentleman and one scholar explore the secret sauce behind cool tech and make it easy to understand.

Farbod: What's going on, folks? Welcome back. As you heard, today we're talking about patching broken hearts just in time for cuffing season. Before we get into it, I just quickly want to talk about today's sponsor, that's going to be Mouser Electronics. If you've been rocking with us, then you know we love Mouser, because Mouser is one of the world's biggest electronic distributors. By the nature of being one of the biggest, they have lot of connections with both industry and academia. They learn about the coolest things usually before anyone else does. And sometimes, sometimes, they make content about it. And the content they make is meant to be really easy to digest, even if you don't have a background in STEM. And that really aligns well with what we do here at The Next Byte. So, we've linked one of these articles in the show notes. And it's all about the types of medical devices that are very well suited for 3D printing, which is well aligned with today's article as well, by the way. But the reason I like this one is it provides a nice little primer on what 3D printing / additive manufacturing is. It goes over the core use cases for medical devices, in the world of medicine and where 3D printing has a role there. So, they go over, for example, like you have your MRIs and your CAT scans, et cetera. 3D printing, not suited for that, right? But you have surgeries where they need to do implants and creating custom guides, that's something where 3D printing has already been delivering value and will continue to deliver value. They then talk about prosthetics, custom-made prosthetics, prosthetics out of different materials, bringing the cost of prosthetics down to be even lower than what they were before, which is super exciting for patients and doctors. And then lastly, kind of aligned with the prosthetics, but something that I've overlooked, hearing aids. They talk about how hearing aids have always been this one shoe - one size fits all approach, where that's really not the case.   People's ears are different. They talk about how 3D printing has allowed us to develop highly accurate shells for in-ear hearing aids that, again, really improve the patient's lives. If any of that is interesting to you, or again, if any of these primers’ is something that you think would be cool to learn about, click the link in the show notes and check out the Mouser article for medical devices, well suited for 3D printing.

Daniel: I always overlooked the 3d printing for medical industry as a whole or this aspect of the industry as a whole. And this is crazy because like two episodes in a row I'm referring to my time when I used to work at FormLabs. But when I went to FormLabs, I saw they have like this full medical team and they're developing medical grade resins and I was like, okay cool like dental resin. Are you printing teeth? And in some cases, they were actually talking about like printing dentures, like prototypes of dentures to show people what it could look like if they got an implant or something like that. But most of the time, what they were printing is surgical guides for these implant procedures. And you can do a really, really complex surgery in the mouth, but they could print test mouths, like they scan your mouth, do a test mouth so that the surgeon can practice on a test mouth. And then they'd also create these guides that like custom snap into your teeth to show the dentist exactly where he needs to cut or to drill or exactly where she needs to cut or implant something. And it made these dental surgeries like the incident recurrence where you need to go back and get a follow-up procedure done, it made that drop significantly. And I had no idea that this whole entire aspect of like medical devices, medical 3D printing existed. And there's even more than just the dental 3D printing guides that exists in this article from Mouser. So, everyone should definitely check it out.

Farbod: Dude, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think some years ago at this point, probably two years ago, we even did an episode on, think, back surgery, where the surgeon was using a mix of augmented reality and 3D printed guides to do back surgery, which is probably one of the most crazy, intricate types of surgery you can do. So that just goes to show, know, anything from dental surgery to back surgery, 3D printing is playing a pivotal role in medicine. Don't overlook it. It's a big margin.

Daniel: And even crazier, today's episode, right? Like not just 3D printing devices to help you, 3D printing the actual tissue that can go into your heart.

Farbod: And it's... I don't even know where to begin with this. Obviously, ETH Zurich, that's where we're going. Usually, they have some of the coolest stuff that we've talked about on this podcast. So naturally we're big fans, but it's ETH Zurich and the University Hospital of Zurich collaborating and they've created a patch for hearts, right? Now again, some context is necessary here. Why are they making a patch for hearts? What exists already? Well, let's say, God forbid, you get some sort of a heart attack. If, I guess, best case scenario, you might just lose a little bit of oxygen flow to the rest of your body because the blood is not pumping. But in some really, really bad cases, there can be heart wall ruptures. And if there is a rupture, which you know, the wall breaks, you're going to have to immediate surgery to patch that out. The way that surgeons typically patch it up is by using bovine pericardial patches. Now, bovine, stemming from a cow, pericardial is like a membrane that's around the heart. That's what they're using to patch up your heart. It's something from a different animal, but also still part of the heart. The reason they use it is because it still allows nutrients to flow through. It pretty much just works like a duct tape on your heart, but it has a lot of downsides. It's not biodegradable, your body just can't decompose it. It's not inert. Sorry, it is inert, so there's no way your tissues can grow around it either. A lot of times it calcifies, which isn't good. You can get thrombosis, which is blood clotage, which also isn't good for something that's between your heart ventricles, or you can get inflammation, which again, not so great for something that's around your heart. All of these downsides have made the researchers wonder, like, is there a better alternative? And that's where we get this new generation of patches, which they call Reinforced Cardiac Patch, or RC Patch. Now, the RC patch, let's just go over the three core components of it, right? You have a mesh, which acts pretty much the same as the bovine transplant. It stops anything from leaking. Incredible. You have these 3D printed lattices made of biodegradable materials that strengthen the mesh so that as your blood is pumping, that blood pressure is not trivial. It doesn't make the mesh pop up, which is great. And then lastly, this is where the genius really kicks in. You have these heart cell loaded hydrogels for healing and this is like a membrane that's part of the entire structure. And then what that means is not only does this patch block the hole, like a duct tape, but over time as your heart muscles, as the heart tissue is starting to heal, it can use this gel almost as a bridge to grow over and it stimulates the regrowth of those cells. And once the regrowth is done and the hydrogel is used up, the remaining bits of the structure, so the mesh and the lattice, just degrade away into your body and you don't have to worry about all these other complications you would get from the bovine tissue.

Daniel: And that's my favorite part of the whole thing, to be honest, is the fact that at the end of the day, the RC patch is there to support healing. does the short term job of like holding pressure in the heart, stopping bleeding, helping restore blood flow to the rest of the body. But it also over time, it doesn't just stay there as a foreign object, it biodegrades and it supports long term healing of the heart where the heart grows back into a complete heart. The way I view it is like it's more like healing a cut than it is like patching a tire. And that sounds like really, really brute force to say like, I'm going to patch a tire. Like that's how I'm going to stop a hole in my heart after my heart ruptured. Like that doesn't seem like a long-term solution. And oftentimes there are long-term complications with using the existing BPP patches that are made from cow tissue to basically do a tire patch on your heart. This feels like a much as procedure that I'd be much more excited about saying, hey, we're going to build the scaffolding. There's going to be living heart cells on the scaffolding. It's going to grow. It's going to do a short-term job of plugging the leak, so to speak, but then it's also going to grow into healthy heart tissue around that. And then the rest of the rigid part of the patch is going to biodegrade. It sounds awesome that it might work inside the heart. And I think in my case, or in this case, they've tested once on an animal, in one pig heart. And in this pig heart, they were able to test that it successfully held pressure, successfully stopped bleeding, helped restore blood flow to the rest of the pig, and then did this thing over time where it biodegraded and it supported healing. I'm excited to see more long-term studies to see how safe this is, but it's definitely something I can get excited about and pretty awesome to see them, again, taking the theme from the beginning of the episode, taking 3D printing from, hey, let me print a device that sits on the body or let me print a surgical guide that helps support during surgery  or different procedures. No, this is let me 3D print a patch that goes in your heart and then plugs a hole in your heart. It went from we're not just 3D printing tools or devices or support, we're 3D printing tissue, which is pretty dang cool if you ask me.

Farbod: Dude, absolutely. And let me just recap it all up, right? So, we have the worst-case scenario, you get a heart attack, the heart wall ruptures, and the best thing that the surgeons can do is take a piece of membrane from a cow's heart and put it on yours to kind of act like a duct tape and reduce any additional complications. That's fine and all. It does what it's supposed to do, but it could be better, especially when you think about the complications of the calcifying of that tissue or the inflammation that can come about and other issues down the road. So, what they've come up with is this 3D printed patch that not only does everything that the bovine patch does, but it actually helps you regrow some of that tissue, some of that membrane that is on your heart. And once it's done doing that, it just dissolves into your body. So, it's completely biodegradable. It stimulates your heart tissue regrowth and it still acts as that handy-dandy duct tape that you just want to have to patch on a broken heart. So, I don't know what else you could ask for. Yeah, I don't know if there's anything else to say. I think we're good to wrap the pod.

Daniel: Yeah, I think that's it.

Farbod: Awesome. Thanks, folks.

As always, you can find these and other interesting & impactful engineering articles on Wevolver.com.

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The Next Byte: We're two engineers on a mission to simplify complex science & technology, making it easy to understand. In each episode of our show, we dive into world-changing tech (such as AI, robotics, 3D printing, IoT, & much more), all while keeping it entertaining & engaging along the way.