Last year, cardiologists at Boston Children’s Hospital reported developing a groundbreaking adhesive patch for sealing holes in the heart. The patch guides the heart’s own tissue to grow over it, forming an organic bridge. Once the hole is sealed, the biodegradable patch dissolves, leaving no foreign material in the body.
As revolutionary as this device was, it still had one major drawback: implanting the patch required highly invasive open-heart surgery. But that may be about to change.
Researchers from the Wyss Institute, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Boston Children’s have jointly designed a radically different way to implant the patch without having to stop the heart, place patients on bypass or cut open their chests. …