Medical Design Briefs - September 2023 - 44

leakage from the ~30 percent seen with
the JetValve to ~13 percent with their
optimized design.
n A New Hope for Human Patients
To test their FibraValve in a more realistic
environment, Hoerstrup's team implanted
it into a living sheep's heart using
minimally invasive surgery. The
FibraValve started to function immediately,
its leaflets opening and closing to
let blood flow through with every heartbeat.
After just one hour, the scientists
observed red and white blood cells infiltrating
the valve's porous scaffolding, as
well as protein called fibrin being deposited
on the outside of the valve. The
valve displayed no damage or problems
following implantation.
" It was very exciting to see the FibraValve
functioning in vivo, especially since
we were coordinating across an ocean
with our colleagues in Zurich to make it
happen, " says co-first author Michael Peters,
a graduate student at the Wyss Institute
and SEAS. " This approach to heart
Air inflow
Motor
Fiber Formation
Stream
valve replacement might open the door
towards customized medical implants
that regenerate and grow with the patient,
making children's lives better. "
" From the clinical perspective, these
first in-vivo results with FibraValve are
promising and motivate us to initiate further
pre-clinical evaluation, " says Hoerstrup,
MD, PhD, who is an associate faculty
at the Wyss Institute and founding
co-director of the Wyss Zurich Translational
Center at ETH Zurich and University
of Zurich, chair and director at Institute
for Regenerative Medicine,
University of Zurich, Switzerland.
The team is looking forward to starting
longer-term animal testing to evaluate the
FibraValve's performance and regenerative
capabilities over weeks and months.
They also anticipate that FRJS could be
used to create a wider variety of implantable
devices, including other valves, cardiac
patches, and blood vessels.
" This team's tenacity and refusal to
rest on their laurels embodies the Wyss
Institute's innovative spirit and commitCollection
Mandrel
After
two days of incubation with living heart valve cells, a
significant number of the cells had adhered to the FibraValve,
indicated here with fluorescent colors. (Credit:
Wyss Institute at Harvard University)
ment to improving the lives of patients by
making game-changing treatments faster,
better, cheaper, and more accessible, "
says Wyss founding director Donald Ingber,
MD, PhD, who is also the Judah Folkman
Professor of Vascular Biology at
Harvard Medical School and the Vascular
Biology Program at Boston Children's
Hospital, and the Hansjörg Wyss Professor
of Bioinspired Engineering at SEAS.
Additional authors of the paper inSolution
input
Orifice
Collector
Motor
A polymer and focused jets of air are forced through the spinning device, and fibers of the polymer collect on a valveshaped
mandrel to form the FibraValve. (Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University)
clude former Wyss Institute and SEAS
members Sarah Motta, Christophe
Chantre, Luca Cera, and Qihan Liu; current
Wyss and SEAS member Huibin
Chang; Elizabeth Cordoves from SEAS;
Emanuela S. Fioretta and Polina Zaytseva
from the Institute for Regenerative
Medicine, University of Zurich; Nikola
Cesarovic from the Deutsches Herzzentrum
der Charite (DHZC) in Berlin and
the ETH Zurich; and Maximilian Emmert
from the Wyss Zurich, DHZC, and
Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin.
This work was supported by the Wyss
Institute at Harvard University, Harvard
SEAS, the Harvard Materials Research
Science and Engineering Center, the European
Union's Horizon 2020 research
and innovation program under grant
agreement no. 852814 (TAVI4Life), the
Swiss National Science Foundation under
Spark grant no. CRSK-3_196717, and
the Swiss National Science Foundation
under grant no. PZ00P3_180138.
This article was written by Lindsay
The FibraValve is composed of long filaments of polymer fibers, which replicate the physical properties of a human heart
valve and are porous enough to allow cells to infiltrate and replace the scaffold with living tissue. (Credit: Wyss Institute
at Harvard University)
44
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Brownell, Wyss Institute. For more information,
contact Kevin Kit Parker, PhD,
Wyss Institute, at kkparker@seas.harvard.
edu or visit https://wyss.harvard.edu.
Medical Design Briefs, September 2023

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Medical Design Briefs - September 2023

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