Engineers at EPFL’s Center for Artificial Muscles have developed a silicone aorta that can reduce how hard patients’ hearts have to pump. Their breakthrough could offer a promising alternative to heart transplants.
Over 23 million people around the world suffer from heart failure. The disease is usually treated with a transplant, but because donated hearts are hard to come by, there is an ongoing need for alternative therapies.
The researchers say that with new developments in cardiac assistance systems, we can delay the need for a transplant – or even eliminate it altogether. Their discovery, which employs flexible actuators, has been published in Advanced Science.
Our aortas are naturally elastic. They expand as blood is pumped into them from the heart’s left ventricle, and then contract to distribute the blood to the rest of the body. But in patients suffering from diseases such as heart failure, the heart has to work harder to accomplish this cycle. To ease the burden on the heart, EPFL engineers have designed an artificial aorta made of silicone and a series of electrodes. Their device is implanted just behind the aortic valve and amplifies the aorta’s efforts, working like an “augmented aorta.” When an electric voltage is applied to the device, the artificial aorta expands to a diameter that’s larger than the natural aorta. The advantage of this system is that it reduces the pressure on a patient’s heart. The idea isn’t to replace the heart, but to assist it.
To validate their system, the engineers built a simulator consisting of pumps and chambers that replicate the blood-flow and pressure conditions within a human heart. By testing their device on the simulator, the researchers were able to reduce the amount of cardiac energy required by 5.5%. The research team now plans to conduct further tests of their artificial aorta, and are already working on a new design that delivers better performance.
However, the real challenge lies in the manufacturing step.
The research team has filed a patent for their technology. The hope is that their discovery can be used to treat other medical conditions, such as urological disorders, that require a similar approach.
News Source: EPFL
