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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

In the not-too-distant future, patients with damaged hearts or livers might receive tissue patches grown in a lab [gizmodo.com]. This week, researchers announced an important development toward that goal: A biodegradable scaffold that allows strips of beating heart tissue to snap together like Velcro.

We’ve gotten pretty good at growing human cells in vitro, but scaling up to tissues and organs presents a few major challenges. One, coaxing a cluster of cells to take on their proper, functional arrangement in a petri dish. Heart-forming cardiomycetes, for instance, all need to line up in the same direction in order to beat together. Two, building lab-grown tissues out in three dimensions. Biomedical researchers use scaffolds to grow thin sheets of tissue, but to be useful for human transplants, these sheets need to stack together.

The new scaffold, developed by researchers at the University of Toronto and published this week in Science Advances, could solve both of these challenges. The scaffold’s honeycomb shape provides a template that causes groups of cells to line up in the same direction. Affixed to the top of each scaffold are a series of T-shaped posts, which serve to hook layers of cells together. The design was inspired by Velcro, which in turn takes inspiration from the burrs some plants use to hitch their seeds onto animals.

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