Curator: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
The history of gold nanoparticles in the use of advanced Medicine is about 15 years old. Dr. Barliya wrote on Diagnosing lung cancer in exhaled breath using gold in 12/2012.nanoparticles
Alchemia commented on an MIT NEWS article on “New cardiac patch uses gold nanowires to enhance electrical signaling between cells” 9/26, 2011
I would respectfully point out that the use of almost nano sized gold particles carrying a positive electrical charge have been developed and used as ultrafine colloidal gold for over ten years and used as a treatment helping to maintain the heart’s natural rhythm, as well as for helping calm the effects of brain related limb tremors.
This ultrafine colloidal gold has also been used successfully to help calm and control the entire neural system and relieve stress related neural pain over the same past ten year period using Ultrafine Colloidal Gold by Alchemedica Intl.
It is in the light of your brilliant nano technology breakthrough, that we feel our own pioneering efforts developing and pushing the boundery in the field of ultrafine colloidal gold, silver, copper and zinc vindicated.
I salute your unorthodox approach and its successful conclusion”
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/gold-nanowire-heart-0926.html
As an Introduction to the Genetics of Conduction Disease, we selected the following article which represents the MOST comprehensive review of the Human Cardiac Conduction System presented to date:
I. The Cardiac Conduction System
- David S. Park, MD, PhD;
- Glenn I. Fishman, MD
Circulation.2011; 123: 904-915 doi: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.110.942284
II. On the Genetics of the Human Conduction System
III. A Promise for the MI Patient: A new cardiac patch uses Gold Nanowires to enhance Electrical Signaling between heart cells
Key term:
Colloidal gold is a suspension (or colloid) of sub-micrometre-sized particles of gold in a fluid – usually water. The liquid is usually either an intense red colour (for particles less than 100 nm), or blue/purple (for larger particles).[1][2][3] Due to theunique optical, electronic, and molecular-recognition properties of gold nanoparticles, they are the subject of substantial research, with applications in a wide variety of areas, including electron microscopy, electronics, nanotechnology,[4][5] andmaterials science.
Properties and applications of colloidal gold nanoparticles strongly depend upon their size and shape.[6] For example, rodlike particles have both transverse and longitudinal absorption peak, and anisotropy of the shape affects their self-assembly.[7]
SOURCE and References for the Key term
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloidal_gold
A heart of gold
IMAGE COURTESY OF THE DISEASE BIOPHYSICS GROUP, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
The unique new approach uses gold nanowires scattered among cardiac cells as they’re grown in vitro, a technique that “markedly enhances the performance of the cardiac patch,” Kohane says. The researchers believe the technology may eventually result in implantable patches to replace tissue that’s been damaged in a heart attack.
Co-first authors of the study are MIT postdoc Brian Timko and former MIT postdoc Tal Dvir, now at Tel Aviv University in Israel; other authors are their colleagues from HST, Children’s Hospital Boston and MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering, including Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor.
Ka-thump, ka-thump
To build new tissue, biological engineers typically use miniature scaffolds resembling porous sponges to organize cells into functional shapes as they grow. Traditionally, however, these scaffolds have been made from materials with poor electrical conductivity — and for cardiac cells, which rely on electrical signals to coordinate their contraction, that’s a big problem.
“In the case of cardiac myocytes in particular, you need a good junction between the cells to get signal conduction,” Timko says. But the scaffold acts as an insulator, blocking signals from traveling much beyond a cell’s immediate neighbors, and making it nearly impossible to get all the cells in the tissue to beat together as a unit.
From micrometers to millimeters
The team took as their base material alginate, an organic gum-like substance that is often used for tissue scaffolds. They mixed the alginate with a solution containing gold nanowires to create a composite scaffold with billions of the tiny metal structures running through it.
Then, they seeded cardiac cells onto the gold-alginate composite, testing the conductivity of tissue grown on the composite compared to tissue grown on pure alginate. Because signals are conducted by calcium ions in and among the cells, the researchers could check how far signals travel by observing the amount of calcium present in different areas of the tissue.
“Basically, calcium is how cardiac cells talk to each other, so we labeled the cells with a calcium indicator and put the scaffold under the microscope,” Timko says. There, they observed a dramatic improvement among cells grown on the composite scaffold: The range of signals conduction improved by about three orders of magnitude.
“In healthy, native heart tissue, you’re talking about conduction over centimeters,” Timko says. Previously, tissue grown on pure alginate showed conduction over only a few hundred micrometers, or thousandths of a millimeter. But the combination of alginate and gold nanowires achieved signal conduction over a scale of “many millimeters,” Timko says.
“It’s really night and day. The performance that the scaffolds have with these nanomaterials is just much, much better,” Kohane says.
“It’s very beautiful work,” says Charles Lieber, a professor of chemistry at Harvard University. “I think the results are quite unambiguous, and very exciting — both in showing fundamentally that they’ve improved the conductivity of these scaffolds, and then how that clearly makes a difference in enhancing the collective firing of the cardiac tissue.”
The researchers plan to pursue studies in vivo to determine how the composite-grown tissue functions when implanted into live hearts. Aside from implications for heart-attack patients, Kohane adds that the successful experiment “opens up a bunch of doors” for engineering other types of tissues; Lieber agrees.
“I think other people can take advantage of this idea for other systems: In other muscle cells, other vascular constructs, perhaps even in neural systems, this is a simple way to have a big impact on the collective communication of cells,” Lieber says. “A lot of people are going to be jumping on this.”
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