Mending broken hearts with tissue engineering

"Broken hearts could one day be mended using a novel scaffold developed by MIT researchers and colleagues. The new scaffold approach could also aid the engineering of other tissues. The idea is that living heart cells or stem cells seeded onto such a scaffold would develop into a patch of cardiac tissue that could be used to treat congenital heart defects, or aid the recovery of tissue damaged by a heart attack. The biodegradable scaffold would be gradually absorbed into the body, leaving behind new tissue. The accordion-like honeycomb scaffold, reported in the November 2 online edition of Nature Materials, is the first to be explicitly designed to match the structural and mechanical properties of native heart tissue. As a result, it has several advantages over previous cardiac tissue engineering scaffolds" - ScienceDaily