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March 25, 2024 — A team of engineers led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently published in the journal nature communications They developed a tissue-like bioelectronic mesh system integrated with an array of atomically thin graphene sensors that can simultaneously measure both electrical signals and physical movements of cells within human heart tissue grown in the laboratory. announced that it had been successfully constructed. In the first study, this tissue-like mesh will be able to grow alongside heart cells, allowing researchers to observe how the heart’s mechanical and electrical function changes during development. This new device will be beneficial not only to those studying heart disease, but also to those studying the potentially toxic side effects of many common drug treatments.

Heart disease is a major cause of human morbidity and mortality worldwide. The heart is also very sensitive to therapeutic drugs, and the pharmaceutical industry spends millions of dollars testing their products to ensure they are safe. However, methods to effectively monitor living heart tissue are very limited.

This is partly because implanting sensors in a living heart is extremely dangerous, but also because the heart is a complex type of muscle with multiple things that need to be monitored. “Heart tissue is very special,” says Jun Yao, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Amherst College of Engineering in Massachusetts and senior author of the paper. “The mechanical activity of contraction and relaxation that pumps blood around the body is coupled with electrical signals that control this activity.”

However, today’s sensors typically can only measure one property at a time, and two sensor devices that can measure both charge and motion are bulky enough to impede cardiac tissue function. Until now, there has been no single sensor that can measure dual characteristics of the heart without interfering with heart function.

The new device consists of two key components, explains lead author Hongyang Gao, a PhD candidate. in electrical engineering from Amherst College. The first is a three-dimensional cardiac microtissue (CMT) grown in the lab from human stem cells under the direction of co-author Yubing Sun, associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Amherst College in Massachusetts. be. CMT is the closest analog to a full-sized living human heart, making it the preferred model for in vitro testing. However, since CMTs are grown in vitro, they must mature, a process that takes time and can be easily interrupted by clumsy sensors.

The second key ingredient includes graphene, a pure carbon material that is only one atom thick. Due to its nature, graphene has some surprising properties that make it ideal for heart sensors. Because graphene is electrically conductive, it can sense electrical charges passing through heart tissue. It is also piezoresistive. In other words, when it stretches due to things like heartbeats, its electrical resistance increases. Graphene is also incredibly thin, allowing it to record even the smallest movements of muscle contraction and relaxation, without interfering with the heart’s function throughout the maturation process. Co-author Jing Kong, an MIT professor of electrical engineering, and her group provided this important graphene material.

“Graphene already has many applications, and it’s great that graphene can be used for this important need because of its various properties,” Kong said.

Next, Gao, Yao, and colleagues embedded a series of graphene sensors into the soft, stretchable, porous mesh scaffold they developed. This scaffold has structural and mechanical properties close to human tissue and can be applied noninvasively to cardiac tissue.

“No one has ever done this before,” Gao says. “Graphene can survive in biological environments for very long periods without degrading and does not lose its conductivity, allowing us to monitor CMTs throughout the maturation process.”

“This is very important for a variety of reasons,” Yao adds. “Our sensors can provide real-time feedback to scientists and pharmaceutical researchers, and we can do so in a cost-effective manner. We are leveraging our electrical engineering insights to support a wide range of research We’re proud to help build tools that help people.”

In the future, Gao says he hopes to be able to adapt the sensor on a larger scale, all the way to in-vivo monitoring, which will provide the best data to help solve heart disease.

This research was supported by the Army Research Office, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Semiconductor Research Corporation, the Link Foundation, and the Applied Life Sciences Institute at Massachusetts Amherst.

For more information: https://www.umass.edu/



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