You may mend a broken heart this valentine’s day now that researchers invented a brand new hydrogel that might be used to heal damaged heart tissue and improve cancer treatments.
University of Waterloo chemical engineering researcher Dr. Elisabeth Prince teamed up with researchers from the University of Toronto and Duke University to design the synthetic material made using cellulose nanocrystals, that are derived from wood pulp. The fabric is engineered to duplicate the fibrous nanostructures and properties of human tissues, thereby recreating its unique biomechanical properties.
“Cancer is a various disease and two patients with the identical style of cancer will often reply to the identical treatment in very alternative ways,” Prince said. “Tumour organoids are essentially a miniaturized version of a person patient’s tumour that might be used for drug testing, which could allow researchers to develop personalized therapies for a selected patient.”
As director of the Prince Polymer Materials Lab, Prince designs synthetic biomimetic hydrogels for biomedical applications. The hydrogels have a nanofibrous architecture with large pores for nutrient and waste transport, which affect mechanical properties and cell interaction.
Prince, a professor in Waterloo’s Department of Chemical Engineering, utilized these human-tissue mimetic hydrogels to advertise the expansion of small-scale tumour replicas derived from donated tumour tissue.
She goals to check the effectiveness of cancer treatments on the mini-tumour organoids before administering the treatment to patients, potentially allowing for personalized cancer therapies. This research was conducted alongside Professor David Cescon on the Princess Margaret Cancer Center.
Prince’s research group at Waterloo is developing similar biomimetic hydrogels to be injectable for drug delivery and regenerative medical applications as Waterloo researchers proceed to guide health innovation in Canada.
Her research goals to make use of injected filamentous hydrogel material to regrow heart tissue damaged after a heart attack. She used nanofibers as a scaffolding for the regrowth and healing of damaged heart tissue.
“We’re constructing on the work that I began during my PhD to design human-tissue mimetic hydrogels that might be injected into the human body to deliver therapeutics and repair the damage caused to the guts when a patient suffers a heart attack,” Prince said.
Prince’s research is exclusive as most gels currently utilized in tissue engineering or 3D cell culture don’t possess this nanofibrous architecture. Prince’s group uses nanoparticles and polymers as constructing blocks for materials and develops chemistry for nanostructures that accurately mimic human tissues.
The subsequent step in Prince’s research is to make use of conductive nanoparticles to make electrically conductive nanofibrous gels that might be used to heal heart and skeletal muscle tissue.
The research was recently published within the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
