Cath Lab Digest - January 2008 - (Page 54)

54 CLINICAL AND INDUSTRY NEWS JANUARY 2008 BioImage Study cont. resonance (MR) and computed tomography (CT) systems. These units will be located at the sites in Illinois, Kentucky and Florida and will seek to enroll a total of 7,300 volunteers. The BioImage Study, which began in December 2008 in Chicago, is expected to end in December 2008 in Florida and will enroll males age 5580 and females age 60-80. The HRP Initiative aims to collaborate on the discovery and development of improved techniques for identifying individuals at risk for heart attacks and the advancement of methods to monitor disease progression and response to treatment. The Initiative expects to provide a total of $30 million in funding over four years and will leverage recent advances in biology and technology to design and optimize a patient care-cycle for highrisk plaque. Currently, Merck, AstraZeneca, and Philips have joined biotechnology research company BG Medicine in this important initiative, which aims to reduce morbidity, mortality and costs associated with cardiovascular disease. ■ Yale Launches Study of Young Women with AMI T he largest, most comprehensive study of young women with heart attacks — VIRGO (Variation in Recovery: Role of Gender on Outcomes in Young AMI patients) — was recently launched at Yale School of Medicine with a $9.7 million National Institutes of Health grant. “This is the first study to focus on this high risk-and highly unstudiedgroup,” said Yale School of Public Health Associate Professor Judith Lichtman, co-principal investigator of the study. “There have been no large, prospective studies of this population, even though the death toll is comparable to that from breast cancer.” She said the research team is exploring what accounts for premature heart disease in women and why they experience worse outcomes than men of similar age with heart disease. The four-year grant will support the study of 2,000 women age 55 and younger with 1,000 men for comparison. The multi-site study bridges disciplines from basic biology and clinical sciences to psychology and health services research. Although women under age 55 with heart attacks represent a small proportion of all patients with heart disease, they account for about 40,000 hospitalizations each year. About 8,000 women under the age of 55 die of heart disease annually, ranking it among the major causes of death in this group. While most women in this age group are protected from heart disease, notes Lichtman, prior research indicates that young women have a much greater risk of dying after a heart attack than men of the same age. The study addresses questions ranging from genetics and clinical care to outcomes, including: How are outcomes of women different from those of men? What are the genetic, demographic, psychosocial, and behavioral factors that contribute to premature heart disease in women? How do delays in clinical presentation and treatment affect the risk and outcomes of women? Do women get the same quality of care as men? “Despite the increasing focus on women with heart disease in recent years, we know little about heart disease in this population,” said principal investigator Harlan M. Krumholz, MD, the Harold H. Hines, Jr. Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale School of Medicine. “Since young women with heart disease are relatively rare at any one hospital, we have assembled an unprecedented network of almost 100 sites nationwide to identify and enroll women for this groundbreaking study.” The investigators have also developed a novel partnership with the American Heart Association’s Go Red For Women, a national movement to raise awareness of heart disease and to empower women to reduce their risk by learning about prevention. The investigators will also collaborate with various other organizations. ■ MIT Works Toward Engineered Blood Vessels Tissue could be used in human body M assachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientists have found a way to induce cells to form parallel tube-like structures that could one day serve as tiny engineered blood vessels. The researchers found that they can control the cells’ development by growing them on a surface with nano-scale patterning. A paper on the work was posted this month in an online issue of Advanced Materials. Engineered blood vessels could one day be transplanted into tissues such as the kidneys, liver, heart or any other organs that require large amounts of vascular tissue, which moves nutrients, gases and waste to and from cells. “We are very excited about this work,” said Robert Langer, MIT Institute Professor and an author of the paper. “It provides a new way to create nano-based systems with what we hope will provide a novel way to someday engineer tissues in the human body.” The work focuses on vascular tissue, which includes capillaries, the tiniest blood vessels, and is an important part of the circulatory system. The team has created a surface that can serve as a template to grow capillary tubes aligned in a specific direction. The researchers built their template using microfabrication machinery at Draper Laboratory in Cambridge. Normally such technology is used to build micro-scale devices, but the researchers adapted it to create nanoscale patterns on a silicone elastomer substrate. The surface is patterned with ridges and grooves that guide the cells’ growth. The cells can sense (the patterns), and they end up elongated in the direction of those grooves,” said Christopher Bettinger, MIT graduate student in materials science and engineering and lead author of the paper. The cells, known as endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), not only elongate in the direction of the grooves, but also align themselves along the grooves. That results in a multicellular structure with defined edges, also called a band structure. Once the band structures form, the researchers apply a commonly used gel that induces cells to form three-dimensional tubes. Unlike cells grown on a flat surface, which form a network of capillary tubes extending in random directions, cells grown on the nano-patterned surface form capillaries aligned in the direction chosen by the researchers. The researchers believe the technique works best with EPCs because they are relatively immature cells. Earlier attempts with other types of cells, including mature epithelial cells, did not produce band structures. Growing tissue on a patterned surface allows researchers a much greater degree of control over the results than the classic tissue engineering technique of mixing cell types with different growth factors and hoping that a useful type of tissue is produced, said Bettinger. “With this technique, we can take the guesswork out of it,” he said. The next step is to implant capillary tubes grown in the lab into tissues of living animals and try to integrate them into the tissues. ■

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Cath Lab Digest - January 2008 Central Baptist Hospital Contrast Media Use in High-Risk Patients An Ergonomic Survey of Cath Lab Repetitive Stress Injuries Contents Clinical Editor’s Corner Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy, a.k.a., Transient Left Ventricular Apical Ballooning Syndrome: An Acute Coronary Syndrome Imposter Searching for the Key to D2B STEMI Intervention News STEMI Interventions: Commentary The Massachusetts Stent Study The Value of Educating Staff Ask the Clinical Instructor: A Q&A Column for Those New to the Cath Lab SICP* Chapter Updates The Society of Invasive Cardiovascular Professionals Holds an RCIS Review Course at New Cardiovascular Horizons 18:20 To Denver — One Student’s First Clinical Experience CEU Education Center Meetings Calendar What Do You Think? Clinical & Industry News Classifieds The Ten-Minute Interview with…Heather Vardon, RN Advertisers Index

Cath Lab Digest - January 2008

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