E-cardiac patch to sense and repair infarcted myocardium

Heart disease is a leading cause of death. Myocardial infarction (MI) happens unexpected and in an immediate way. Researching cardiac patches in how to recover the damaged heart tissue after an attack can help more patients to not only survive the initial strike, but also the aftershocks that can do the worst damage. Conductive cardiac patches (CCPs) can rebuild electroactive microenvironment for the infarcted myocardium but their repair effects benefit by carried seed cells or drugs. The key to success is the effective integration of electrical stimulation combined with CCPs created microenvironment. Currently, triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) in myocardial tissue engineering act only as electrical power source to indirectly stimulate CMs maturation and synchronous contraction of CMs in vitro. However, TENG is not a CP where CMs cannot grow. There are also implantable TENGs to monitor heart rate signals in vivo, but they are not able be used as therapeutic electrodes and present no repairing effect. The TRI-TENG in this research is a CCP whose reduced graphene membrane can be therapeutic electrode for cardiac repair (serve as cardiac patch). It is also self-powered by transferring the mechanical energy of beating heart into electrical energy. Thus, the CCP can directly provide electrical stimulation of CMs meanwhile it is a remote sensor for diagnosing heart diseases. The authors also verified the hypothesis and design in rat and minipig model.