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2023-12-18

MIT designs robotic heart chamber

An ingenious fusion of real heart tissue and synthetic muscles could profoundly expand scientists’ view into cardiology’s greatest remaining mystery: the lesser-known right heart ventricle. MIT engineers created a bionic ventricle replica combining actual cardiac cells with artificial pumps tuned to mimic healthy and diseased conditions for testing therapies targeting right heart disorders.

While its more famous left-sided counterpart powers systemic circulation, the right ventricle drives the separate pulmonary loop through the lungs. Its unique shape and motion make revealing underlying mechanics difficult compared to the left ventricle’s relatively simple contractions.

Consequently, right heart disorders often elude diagnosis while afflicting intensive care patients on ventilators. Limited imaging, scarce comparative data, and few platforms exist currently assessing right ventricular treatments.

MIT’s robotic right ventricle, or RRV, bridges these gaps powerfully. Encapsulating an excised pig ventricle preserves intricate natural structures like flimsy valve leaflets impossible to recreate synthetically. Wrap-around artificial “muscles” then recreate rhythmic inflation sequences from computational models, causing the ventricle to beat and pump fluid realistically.

Tuning those sequenced contractions simulates healthy function or conditions like irregular heartbeats, weakening contractions, even heart attacks. The resulting bioinspired replica thus replicates right ventricular anatomy and physiology with unprecedented fidelity for exploring dysfunction mechanisms and testing devices.

Early successes underscore this potential. By surgically manipulating the RRV’s valves, researchers modeled leakage seen in tricuspid valve regurgitation before deploying repair devices. Measuring ensuing fluid dynamics and ventricular performance revealed which implants best restored normal flows.

Such surgical rehearsals on the RRV before attempting patient procedures promises huge training benefits. But more fundamentally, fully instrumented ventricles with tunable parameters facilitate experiments impossible in humans. Scientists can non-invasively probe tissue stresses, oxygen transport, metabolic shifts—even genomic patterns—underpinning disease processes from pulmonary hypertension to heart failure.

Human studies remain essential validating findings. But bioinspired models neatly complement clinical research by enabling systematic manipulation, comparison, and intervention impossible in people. Just as crash test dummies revolutionized automotive safety experiments through controlled, replica trauma, replicated organs like the RRV could transform discovery of respective disease mechanisms.

In fact, the research team is already working on an integrated biventricular replica also including the left ventricle. This artificial beating heart could significantly accelerate evaluating cardiac devices and interventions prior to costly and risky human trials. It may one day even support transitional circulation in organ transplant patients as a bridge to implantation.

Of course, such visions remain distant prospects contingent on replicating ever more intricate physiology in synthetic organs. Current limitations around durability and incorporation of electrical conduction pathways must also be overcome. Still, the net direction seems brightly positive for this fusion of biotechnology, materials science, and medical device engineering to birth bold new horizons in biomedicine.

From illuminating the right heart’s workings to testing new therapies and even building patient bridges, bioinspired robotic organs promise a new era in tackling lingering mysteries of cardiac function. Medicine may thus increasingly harness technology’s powers to recreate biology’s marvels. With innovations like the remarkable RRV, glimpse a fascinating future where science decisively conquers disease through designer replicas powering pioneering research at last unchecked by human constraints.

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