{"id":26088,"date":"2019-09-27T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-27T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tmc.edu\/news\/2019\/09\/repairing-faulty-electricity-in-the-heart-with-conductive-thread\/"},"modified":"2020-01-06T19:22:27","modified_gmt":"2020-01-06T19:22:27","slug":"repairing-faulty-electricity-in-the-heart-with-conductive-thread","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tmc.edu\/news\/2019\/09\/repairing-faulty-electricity-in-the-heart-with-conductive-thread\/","title":{"rendered":"Repairing faulty electricity in the heart with conductive thread"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you\u00a0ever been in a place where the lights flicker and threaten to go out, thanks to faulty electricity?\u00a0Now imagine that place is your body.<\/p>\n

Electrical impulses set the rhythm and rate of your heartbeat. The sparks start in a cluster of cells in the right atrium and then spread through the upper chambers of the heart, forcing them to contract and push blood into the ventricles.<\/p>\n

When these electrical signals go haywire, though, the heart\u2019s ability to pump oxygen-rich blood from the ventricles out to the body is jeopardized. A heart that beats too quickly, too slowly or erratically can be life-threatening.<\/p>\n

But what if there was a new way to repair the heart\u2019s electrical system? What if surgeons could sew a current directly into the soft tissue?<\/p>\n

Most ventricular arrhythmias\u2014the umbrella term for abnormal heartbeats\u2014occur in hearts that contain scar tissue from previous heart attacks, heart surgery or diseased heart muscle. Why? Because scar tissue does not conduct electricity.<\/p>\n

Typically, surgeons defibrillate the heart\u2014send it a controlled electrical shock\u2014to reset the electrical system, and then implant a pacemaker or defibrillator to maintain it. But a new material, developed and tested in the Texas Medical Center, might\u00a0be able to repair the heart\u2019s electrical current in a more efficient way.<\/p>\n

A highly conductive thread made from carbon nanotube fibers could build a bridge over or through soft scar tissue. In essence, surgeons would stitch an electrical bridge in the heart.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Matteo Pasquali, M.D., the A.J. Hartsook Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, Chemistry, and Materials Science & NanoEngineering at Rice University, holds up a strand of carbon nanotube fibers.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThere are two steps to making this material,\u201d said Rice University<\/a> chemical and biomolecular engineer, Matteo Pasquali,<\/a> Ph.D., who led a team of scientists from Rice, the Netherlands, Israel and the U.S. Air Force that perfected the conductive thread in 2013. \u201cThe first step is turning gaseous hydrocarbons into carbon nanotubes, which are\u00a0produced in powder form. The next step turns the powder into a fiber.\u201d<\/p>\n

The thread itself is made of \u201clots and lots of tiny cylinders that are only about one to two nanometers in diameter, so each one of those cylinders is 10,000 to 100,000 times smaller than a human hair,\u201d Pasquali explained, fiddling with a spool of the extremely ordinary-looking thread in his office.<\/p>\n

Pasquali\u2019s friend, Texas Heart Institute<\/a> (THI) cardiologist Mehdi Razavi<\/a>, M.D., knew that Pasquali\u2019s lab was working on this special thread and took a keen interest.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe played with it and kept thinking that it handles like thread, but he knew it was conductive,\u201d Pasquali said. \u201cSuture thread is not conductive. We started thinking about what we\u00a0could do with it since we now have something conductive, soft and flexible.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"

Mehdi Razavi, M.D., is a cardiologist and Director of Electrophysiology Clinical Research and Innovations at Texas Heart Institute.<\/p><\/div>\n

For Razavi, Director of Electrophysiology Clinical Research and Innovations at THI, the material seemed like a perfect fit for a busy organ with continuous complex motion. He thought the thread could be particularly useful to treat the most serious type of arrhythmia, ventricular fibrillation (VF), which occurs when chaotic electrical activity causes the lower chambers of the heart to quiver (or fibrillate), rather than beat.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the beach, if you are standing waist-high in the water and a wave hits you, what happens?\u201d Razavi asked. \u201cThe wave breaks. And if you look around your tummy, you\u2019re going to see little eddy currents. Now, if you\u2019re the scar and the heartbeat is coming and it hits an area where it can\u2019t go through, the heartbeat wave can create an eddy current. When an eddy current
\nhappens in the bottom chamber of the heart, it\u2019s called ventricular fibrillation. VF is why someone is talking to you one minute and then they drop dead the next.\u201d<\/p>\n

But carbon nanotube fibers allow the wave to go straight through you, with no eddy currents, he said, completing the metaphor.<\/p>\n

“That’s how\u00a0fundamental this correction of conduction velocity is,\u201d Razavi said. \u201cThese fibers maintain the electrical current. They can become a bridge, over or through scar tissue, to maintain the current without delay.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s one question Razavi keeps getting asked by heart surgeons. \u201cThe question everyone has is: You\u2019re putting some-thing that\u2019s superconductive through scar tissue? Why now? Anyone can do that with a piece of silver or silver rod,\u201d Razavi said. \u201cThat\u2019s true, but the problem is, on the average, the heart beats 115,000 times a day. That\u2019s a lot\u2014and it’s not squeezing. It\u2019s a torsion, where it\u2019s getting closer from the tip to the base, so it\u2019s squeezing and rotating.\u201d No metal would be able to keep up with those rapid and frequent torsions, Razavi said. No metal would be able to survive that environment. Until now.<\/p>\n

Razavi and Pasquali led a study of the conductive thread in large preclinical models. Results were published in the American Heart Association\u2019s journal, Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology<\/em><\/a>. Experiments showed the nontoxic, polymer-coated fibers, whose ends were stripped to serve as electrodes, were effective in restoring function, whether the initial conduction was slowed, severed or blocked. In addition, the thread functioned with or without the presence of a pacemaker.<\/p>\n

On the down side, nanoparticles always carry with them the potential for toxicity.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn our study, we had this suture in models for as long as\u00a0three months and there was no evidence of toxicity,\u201d Razavi explained. \u201cThere is a concern, though, about an inherent hazard in nanoparticles. But the studies that have been done with nanoparticles in the past are using dust-like particles that are in the same vicinity of size as, say, asbestos. It\u2019s not that asbestos itself is poisonous. What happens is,\u00a0when you breathe it, it provides a constant irritant for cells, so cells are reproducing, growing, trying to create an inflammatory response. Any time you have a lot of cells reproducing, one of them can be a black sheep and that black sheep can turn into cancer. But we didn\u2019t find any problems with toxicity in any of the clinical studies and we weren\u2019t expecting to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carbon\u00a0nanotubes are a young technology, not to be confused with carbon fibers.<\/p>\n

Carbon fibers\u2014stiff, brittle, lightweight and five times stronger than steel\u2014can be found in bicycle frames, softball bats, hockey sticks, golf clubs, tennis rackets and other items that need to be strong but not heavy.<\/p>\n

Carbon nanotube fibers differ from carbon fibers in that they are electrically conductive and they are also extremely flexible.<\/p>\n

Some questions must be answered before the conductive thread can be used in humans, though, including how long and how wide the fibers should be and how they would perform in the growing hearts of young patients.<\/p>\n

Best-case scenario, the thread could be used in human patients in three years, Razavi estimated, adding that the applications are seemingly limitless. In addition to mend-ing damaged hearts, carbon nanotube fibers are being studied for use in cochlear implants, electrical interfaces with the brain and for various applications in the automotive and aerospace industries.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery time a cardiac surgeon opens you up and cuts, they have to suture,\u201d Razavi said. \u201cIf that suturing is done on cardiac tissue, that\u2019s a scar that blocks the conduction impulse. So if the chest is open and they have to close it with a suture anyway, why not use this thread as a preemptive strike? All you have to do is put this in the hand of the surgeon. The suture already needs to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have you\u00a0ever been in a place where the lights flicker and threaten to go out, thanks to faulty electricity?\u00a0Now imagine that place is your body. Electrical impulses set the rhythm and rate of your heartbeat. The sparks start in a cluster of cells in the right atrium and then spread through the upper chambers of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":26091,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4088,4089,397,54,28,4090],"yoast_head":"\nRepairing faulty electricity in the heart with conductive thread - TMC News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A highly conductive thread made from carbon nanotube fibers could build a bridge over or through soft scar tissue in the heart.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tmc.edu\/news\/2019\/09\/repairing-faulty-electricity-in-the-heart-with-conductive-thread\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Repairing faulty electricity in the heart with conductive thread - 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