Every ten minutes an Australian has a heart attack. Twenty-five percent of these patients will miss timely treatment, leading to heart failure from permanent heart damage. Many with advanced heart failure patients will end up on a lengthy transplant waiting list, facing uncertain availability or potential rejection of a new heart. In Australia, around 120 hearts are transplanted every year, whereas over 10,000 patients develop heart failure per year.  

Dr Carmine Gentile is a bioprinting expert who, with his team is working towards producing heart patches made of personalised ‘bio-inks’. In this way they aim to regenerate parts of the heart that have died following a severe heart attack.   

Dr Gentile’s multidisciplinary team has created a novel way to 3D bioprint heart tissues using patients’ own cells to repair heart damage and regain cardiac muscle function. Cells isolated from patients’ own blood are first used to generate stem cells and then transformed into heart cells. Dr Gentile has developed a new way to use these cells by generating personalised “bio-inks” that can be extruded through the nozzle of a 3D bioprinter to produce 3D bioprinted heart tissues.  These can then be transplanted on a patient’s heart to regain function and provide a healthy life. 

Thanks to the support of Heart Research Australia, the bioprinted heart tissues have been tested to make sure that they contract like a healthy heart and that they can improve how the heart contracts after their transplantation using preclinical models of heart failure. Funding from Heart Research Australia was used to leverage additional  support from the Ian Potter Foundation and the University of Technology Sydney to bring the first system from the UK to study the function of bioprinted heart tissue. This is critical to ensure they could be safely transplanted in patients.   

This technology offers an alternative and safer solution to improve the quality of life for these patients. The bioprinted tissue can be folded and therefore it can be transplanted through a keyhole procedure, which is less invasive compared with a heart transplant. This means a faster recovery and that more than the current 120 heart transplant patients can be treated every year. 

Dr Gentile’s patch is also a faster solution for heart failure patients. Bioprinting and grafting a custom-sized heart tissue patch for a patient could take up to six months, a substantial reduction from the waiting time for a transplant (usually two years). Furthermore, the engineered heart tissue patch would not require the lifelong use of anti-rejection drugs that accompany a heart transplant.  

More recently, Dr Gentile’s team developed a more elastic patch by adding a derivate of silk. The silk-containing patch helped cells to contract better, as well as it improved the durability of the patch, with the potential to create a long lasting solution for patients.  

This study, which was supported also by Heart Research Australia, has been published in the specialty journal of Biofabrication.

Project Title: Developing 3D bioprinted cardiac patches using human stem cells for heart regeneration 
Lead Researcher: Dr Carmine Gentile