It began over a lunch of spinach salad about two years ago.
Glenn Gaudette, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, was eating with graduate student Joshua Gershlak, who started to look at the spinach leaf in ways he had not before. Due to its structure, Gershlak thought it might help them overcome a tremendous challenge in heart regeneration — getting blood flow to regenerated tissue after a heart attack.
That lunch discussion led Gaudette, with colleagues, to a series of experiments. Now, the team reports it has created in a lab beating human heart cells on spinach leaves stripped of the plant cells. The preliminary research, the team says, opens the door to using multiple spinach leaves to grow layers of healthy heart tissue to help treat patients after a heart attack.
WebMD asked Gaudette to elaborate.
WebMD: Tell us more about the research and its implications.
Gaudette: My lab is interested in cardiac regeneration. We need to get blood flow to the regenerated tissue, so we looked to the spinach leaf to do that. If you hold the spinach leaf up to the light you can see a nice pattern of veins. The leaf needs to transport water just as the blood vessels need to transport blood to the heart muscles. They are both fluid. We took advantage of that vascular system in the spinach leaf to transport fluid to the [heart] cells we grew on the spinach leaf.
WebMD: How did you do it?
Gaudette: Before we can transport the cells onto the leaf, we need to get rid of the spinach cells. We washed them out with detergent and we are left with that structure without the plant cells. The scaffold is composed of cellulose, which is used in a lot of medical applications already. We can put the cardiac cells on top and we have the scaffold capable of delivering fluid.
WebMD: What are the implications of the research?
Gaudette: The implication for patients suffering from heart attack is this: when a patient has a heart attack, part of the heart wall dies and no longer contracts. The goal of our research is to take contracting cardiac cells, put them on the spinach leaf and transport that to the damaged region to restore function to the damaged part of the heart.
WebMD: What are the caveats? What challenges you will work on next?
Gaudette: A couple of things we are looking at overcoming. The thickness of the leaf is much thinner than the average human heart wall. So we are looking to stack leaves on top of each other.
The plant [system] has inlet flow but not return flow, while humans have inlet and return flow with arteries and veins. We are looking to overcome that limitation of the leaves by stacking multiple leaves and using some leaves as inlets and some as outlets.
The plant [system] has inlet flow but not return flow, while humans have inlet and return flow with arteries and veins. We are looking to overcome that limitation of the leaves by stacking multiple leaves and using some leaves as inlets and some as outlets.
We are currently conducting biocompatibility tests. We need to replicate the environment that the decellularized spinach leaf will be in when implanted into the body. To accomplish this we will perform tests that entail measuring the toxicity in multiple human cells when they are seeded near the material. We are quite a ways from [these] implants in humans.
It’s good to dream. We are thinking of different forms, sizes and shapes of plants [for different regenerative medicine applications, such as cartilage and bone]. The limits are endless.
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