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Qatar University researchers collaborate to develop living heart valves

Published: 19 Jul 2020 - 10:47 am | Last Updated: 01 Nov 2021 - 10:19 am
Dr. Anwarul Hasan, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Qatar University, with his students.

Dr. Anwarul Hasan, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Qatar University, with his students.

The Peninsula

Doha: Qatar University (QU) collaborates with Imperial College London, Biostage, Inc. in the US, and the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, to develop living heart valves that can grow with the body and integrate with the patient’s native tissue.

The collaborative team generated heart valves using a combination of nanotechnology, 3D printing and tissue engineering, which involves recently developed techniques to grow living cells into functional tissues or organs.

Tissue engineering has already been used to successfully develop human skin and bladders. One of the team member, Dr. MD Anwarul Hasan, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at QU said: “Biologically engineered organs and tissues are in high demand, especially due to an enormous shortage of organ donors.” Heart valve diseases are one of the most common reasons for cardiac failure which increases the need of heart valves.

According to the statistics, more than 90,000 people require heart valve replacement in the US particularly. The two main options available for heart valve replacement currently which are mechanical and bio prosthetic valves.

Mechanical valves, which are often made from metal, require patients to take blood thinning agents for the rest of their lives, while bio prosthetics, made from animal tissue, have a limited life span and must be replaced after 10 to 20 years. Both types of valve are unable to grow with time, meaning young patients may have to undergo several valve replacement operations during their lifetime.

According to Hasan: “Bioengineered tissue valves will last longer, be adopted by the body without rejection, and grow with the patient’s growth.”

Using a special nano fibrebased biomaterial that is strong, flexible and biodegradable, to bioengineer heart valve the first team made a 3D scaffold shaped like a heart valve. Then they injected the scaffold with living cardiac stem cells and cultured it in a tissue incubator.

The cells grew and multiplied over a period of 15 days, gradually and partially replacing the scaffold, which slowly degraded. This process is expected to continue inside the body after implantation, until the valve is fully integrated with the patient’s native tissue. A novel method was developed by the researchers to simulate a cardiac system, which allows to test how the engineered valves affect blood flow.

The results showed that the tissue engineered heart valves mimicked the functions of natural heart valves, opening and closing effectively at speeds and pressures similar to commercially available heart valves.

The tissue engineered heart valves have only been tested in the lab so far. Next plan of the team is to test the valves in living organisms under various conditions to assess if they can be safely investigated for humans. For example, longer-term experiments are needed to fully understand the degradation and cell growth process inside the body.