Live Artificial Heart Valves
The valve grows with the person
German scientists have created a technology for manufacturing a heart valve that grows with a person.
Moskovsky KomsomoletsAn artificial heart valve, if it is implanted in a child, is bad, in particular, because its size does not change as the patient grows.
As a result, the latter has to undergo several painful, dangerous, and in a market economy, expensive operations to replace a small valve with a larger one. Scientists from the Hanover Medical School have figured out how to solve this problem. They propose to manufacture the valve as follows. First, take the pig's heart valve. Then, all living cells are removed from it, leaving only connective tissue. After that, the resulting frame is populated with cells that have been isolated from the patient's blood. In a few weeks, the new valve is ready for transplant. It does not cause an immune response and, moreover, grows with the patient.
Professor Alex Haverick began similar experiments in 1995. By 2002, the technique created by him and his colleagues, Doctors Michael Harder and Sergey Chebotar, had reached such a degree of perfection that it became possible to conduct clinical trials. Since then, a biotechnological heart valve transplant operation has been performed sixteen times for children of different ages. The first two of them successfully lived the six years that have passed since then without experiencing any particular troubles and, most importantly, the need for repeated operations.
The whole story began after the German Society for the Promotion of Science, Professor Haverick, received the Leibniz Prize for achievements in the field of transplantology. With the amount received, which in 1995 was equivalent to three million marks, he founded the Leibniz Laboratory of Biotechnology and Artificial Organs at the Hanover Medical School. And in 2008, the team headed by him was nominated for the creation of a growing heart valve for the award of the President of Germany, which is to be presented on December 9 this year. The amount of this award is 250 thousand euros. This is reported by Informnauka.
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