Researchers have developed a stem-cell loaded hydrogel that sticks for days to the wall of a beating heart. The hydrogel acts as a “Synthetic Stem Cell Niche” for accelerating Tissue Repair after Myocardial Infarction, according to a study. Although stem cell therapy offers the promise of “Organ repair on demand,” using stem cells in the heart itself has not yielded much success because very few of the transplanted cells survive, said the study’s corresponding author M.
Roselle Abraham, MBBS, MD, assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and medical director of the Johns Hopkins Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Center of Excellence, in Baltimore, MD. Earlier experiments that injected stem cells into the heart wall showed that, when the heart beats, the cells are pushed out into the lungs before they get a chance to adhere to the wall, Dr. Abraham…
