Researchers have succeeded in developing a gel from wood pulp to heal damaged heart tissue and improve cancer treatments.
- Researchers have invented a new hydrogel that can be used to heal damaged heart tissue.
- It was designed from cellulose nanocrystals, derived from wood pulp.
- It could also be used to develop personalized anticancer therapies.
A gel made from wood pulp capable of treating damaged heart tissue. This is what Dr. Elisabeth Prince, a chemical engineering researcher at the University of Waterloo, managed to develop with the help of scientists from Duke University and Toronto. This product has been featured in detail in the review Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in December 2023.
A gel that repairs damaged hearts
This “hydrogel” was made from cellulose nanocrystals, derived from wood pulp. It was designed to reproduce the fibrous nanostructures and properties of human tissues. Its architecture based on nanofibers can, for example, allow the transport of nutrients and waste, thanks to the presence of “pores”.
In Dr. Elisabeth Prince’s research, the product is used as a scaffold to promote the regrowth and healing of damaged heart tissue. “We are building on the work I started during my PhD to design human tissue mimetic hydrogels that can be injected into the human body to deliver therapeutic treatments and repair damage to the heart when a patient experiences a seizure cardiacexplains the expert in a press release from its establishmentpublished on February 12, 2024.
Healing damaged hearts is not the scientist’s only goal. She also plans to use this hydrogel in research into treatments against cancer.
Hydrogel could also improve cancer treatment
“Cancer is a diverse disease and two patients with the same type of cancer will often respond to the same treatment very differently”, explains Dr. Prince. Her idea is to use the hydrogel she designed, to create small-scale tumor replicas derived from donated tumor tissue. These cellular structures created in-vitro, called organoids, could be used to test the effectiveness of a treatment before administering it to cancer patients. This could help enable personalized cancer therapies.
“Tumor organoids are essentially a miniaturized version of an individual patient’s tumor that can be used to test drugs, which could allow researchers to develop personalized therapies for a specific patient”confirms the researcher.
The next stage of his work plans to use conductive nanoparticles to make electrically conductive nanofibrous gels that could be used to heal the heart, but also skeletal muscle tissue.