A Bandage for a Heart, Version 2
A Bandage for a Heart, Version 2
This image, captured by Martin E Kolewe, Hyoungshin Park, Robert Langer and Lisa E Freed, shows a tissue engineered heart muscle growing on a polymer scaffold.
Koch Institute at MIT, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, Draper Laboratory
Martin E Kolewe, Hyoungshin Park, Robert Langer, Lisa E Freed
Langer Laboratory, Koch Institute, and C.S. Draper Laboratory
Confocal Micrograph
"We took this image to try to closely examine the behavior of heart cells when grown on our scaffolds: we were interested in how the cells elongated, aligned, and interacted with each other and with our scaffolds. Most often, cell behavior on scaffolds is studied in 2-D, but here we created a multi-layered scaffold with a novel 3-D pore architecture, and we were trying to learn whether the cells would weave around scaffold features created in the 3rd dimension by our specific stacking pattern - which they clearly did! This type of device could eventually be implanted to aid in recovery following a heart attack."
