Scientists Use Silk To Create Artificial Heart Tissue

Silk is a pretty amazing substance when you think about it. It can be used to make a huge variety of items; from silk pillowcases and silk bedding to artillery gunpowder bags. Well it’s just gotten a bit more versatile as boffins from the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research, based in Bad Nauheim, Germany, have invented an artificial heart tissue from the silk produced by tropical silkworms.

Reportedly the silk has been used in the manufacturing process for coin-sized discs, designed to treat heart tissue. It is believed that this artificial tissue can be used to repair damaged heart muscles.

A healthy heart is vital if you want to live a long, full life and any medical expert will tell you that the heart is fine tuned for efficient performance. It’s the heart’s job to pump blood throughout the body under various different physical and environmental conditions throughout your lifetime. This is a stressful task for an organ to perform and its ability to perform its primary function is severely hindered by heart complications, which can weaken heart cells and tissues.

The study, conducted in co-operation with an Indian team of scientists in Kharagpur, attempted to discover alternative materials that could be used to fashion replacement tissue samples. As a result, a large number of fibers were tested during the experimentation process in order to find an answer to the question.

"All fibers tested, whether natural or artificial origin, had serious drawbacks," said Felix Engel, a head researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute. "Either they were too brittle, they were attacked by the immune system or the heart muscle did not quite settle on the fibers."

However, the fiber produced by tropical silkworms was found to have some significant advantages, according to another researcher, Chinmoy Patra.
Engels said that the study demonstrated that the adhesive quality was critical in allowing cells to growth and attach. "The surface has protein structures that facilitate the adhesion of heart muscle cells. It's also coarser than other silk fibers."

We’re still a ways off using silk to create working artificial heart tissue, though. The study was conducted on rat cells as “the problem of obtaining sufficient human cardiac cells as starting material has not yet been solved.”

By: newsstar

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