![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Credit: Sarah Motta and Christophe Chantre The valves are designed to be temporary and regenerative: they provide a porous scaffold for cells to infiltrate, build upon, and eventually replace as the polymer biodegrades.Ī video showing a synthetic heart valve (manufactured using Focused Rotary Jet Spinning) opening and closing. To make the valves, the researchers use air jets to direct liquid polymer onto a valve-shaped frame, resulting in a seamless meshwork of tiny fibers. They're responsible for controlling one-way blood flow through the heart with every beat, they open fully to allow blood to flow forwards, and then close fully to prevent blood from flowing backwards. Pulmonary heart valves are made up of three partially overlapping leaflets that open and close with every heartbeat. "We can create really small fibers-on the nanoscale-that mimic the extracellular matrix that heart valve cells are used to living and growing inside, and we can spin full valves in a matter of minutes, in contrast to currently available technologies that can take weeks or months to make." "The two big advantages of our method are speed and spatial fidelity," says bioengineer Michael Peters of Harvard University, one of the study's first authors. ![]()
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