June 5, 2007 — A patch designed to help damaged cardiac tissue recover from a heart attack has been successful in early animal testing and is moving toward potential human use, researchers report.
"It is a biodegradable, porous polyurethane scaffold that is placed atop the infarcted [damaged] region of the heart," explained study author William R. Wagner, a professor of surgery and bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. "It changes the environment during the remodeling process, and degrades over several months. The impact of it is to have a thicker heart wall."