New heart ‘Band-Aid’ tech could serve as cheaper, more accessible heart transplant alternative

A genetic “Band-Aid” designed to patch up injured hearts could be the answer to the age-old problem of lengthy heart transplant waitlists and risky surgeries, thanks to a recent technological breakthrough.

A band of researchers from the University of Technology Sydney have spent the last 20 years developing a piece of technology they call the “heart patch”, which may become a key alternative to heart transplants.

UTS Associate Professor Carmine Gentile spearheads the project, which he describes as an accumulation of “Lego bricks” which combine to build “mini-hearts”.

The Lego bricks, in this case, are a mix of stem cells, blood cells and heart cells, which come together to make a personalised “mini-heart” which researchers are able to install into the injured heart of a human being.

“Many years ago, we tried to find the optimal materials to print the mini-hearts in... the breakthrough recently came from the studies of one of my PhD students, who was able to identify that the addition of one material – in this case, silk from silkworms – was able to give the patch its elasticity so it can contract and relax over time with a human heart,” Professor Gentile said.

One patient, Jayden Cummins, described the experience of his heart transplant surgery as like being “cracked in half”.

“It doesn’t tickle. You’re getting cracked open, you’re getting cracked in half. Stenotomy is painful, and it takes months of rehab and recovery to get beyond that,” Mr Cummins said.

“On top of that, you’ve got a new organ that isn’t yours which has been introduced into your system, so your body is constantly trying to reject it.

“Getting a transplant was described to me, essentially, as replacing one set of problems with a slightly more manageable set of different problems.”

In 2017, Mr Cummins was a 46-year-old single dad who caught what he thought was a simple case of the flu, before a series of shock hospital visits and a dramatically deteriorated level of health revealed he was actually suffering from catastrophic heart failure.

After a rollercoaster couple of days, during which he was briefly faced with a potential 48-hour window to permanently say goodbye to his family, Mr Cummins was stabilised and he eventually went on to receive a heart transplant.

Mr Cummins said the new technology being developed by Professor Gentile’s team could potentially amount to a “holy grail” of heart treatment.

“Anything that could potentially take transplants off the table and shield you with your own DNA, with your own stem cells, then that means you don’t have two competing pieces of tissue in your body and that’s basically the holy grail of treatment.”

Professor Gentile’s team are currently seeking donations for their work to continue, so that it may potentially advance into clinical trials.

“In the absence of that material, we were not able to maintain the patch in a reliable way for a long time, so we are now very confident that we can move quickly to clinical trials as soon as possible.”

Professor Gentile said the major shortfalls of heart transplants were invasive surgeries and a near-permanently hyper-limited supply of fresh hearts.

“Remember, in a heart surgery there is a huge cut onto the chest of the patient. Basically, patients need on average six months to recover from the procedure itself. Our patch is a bandaid, and it’s elastic, so it’s minimally invasive,” he said.

“The patient can receive a patch in a much safer way, and even potentially get it replaced if something goes wrong. That was an important feature that came up based on interactions we had with some patients who received heart transplants.”