Engineers at MIT have developed a special patch that may help heal the heart after a heart attack. This flexible patch is placed directly on the heart and can deliver several different drugs over time.
In tests with rats, the treatment helped reduce heart damage by half and made heart function much better.
Heart attacks damage the heart muscle, and the injured tissue does not usually heal well on its own.
This often leads to a long-term loss of heart function. The goal of the MIT researchers is to help the heart recover and grow stronger after a heart attack.
The patch they created contains tiny drug-filled particles that are programmed to release their medicine at specific times.
This allows the patch to deliver the right drug at the right moment during the healing process. If approved for use in humans, this patch could become a powerful tool to help heart attack patients recover more fully.
This study was led by Ana Jaklenec and Robert Langer from MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. The lead author was Erika Wang, a former postdoctoral researcher at MIT. Their findings were published in the journal Cell Biomaterials.
Right now, when a patient has a heart attack, doctors often perform bypass surgery to improve blood flow. But this surgery does not fix the damaged heart muscle. The MIT team wanted to find a way to help heal that tissue during surgery.
To do this, they designed drug capsules made from a material called PLGA. These capsules act like tiny coffee cups with lids. The lids break down at different times, allowing the drug inside to be released in a planned order. For this study, the capsules were made to release drugs at three stages: days 1–3, days 7–9, and days 12–14 after the patch was placed on the heart.
Each group of capsules contains a different drug. The first drug, neuregulin-1, helps protect heart cells from dying. The second drug, VEGF, encourages new blood vessels to form. The third drug, GW788388, helps prevent scar tissue from forming, which can hurt the heart’s ability to work properly.
All of these capsules were placed into a soft, contact-lens-like gel made from safe materials. This gel forms the patch, which is then attached to the heart during surgery. The patch is small—just a few millimeters across—but it carries big potential.
To test how well the patch worked, the researchers tried it first on small heart tissue models made from human cells. They mimicked heart attack conditions and then placed the patch on the tissue. The results showed more blood vessel growth, less cell death, and less scarring.
Then, they tested the patch in rats that had heart attacks. The treated rats had 33% higher survival, 50% less damaged tissue, and much better heart function compared to untreated rats or those that received drug injections through the veins.
The patch also slowly dissolved over time, leaving only a thin layer after a year, without interfering with the heart’s movement.
This breakthrough combines advanced drug delivery with safe materials to create a new kind of healing treatment. Two of the drugs used—neuregulin-1 and VEGF—have already been tested in human trials for heart conditions. The third drug, GW788388, is still being studied in animals.
The team now hopes to test the patch in more animal studies before planning human trials. They’re also working on new ways to deliver the treatment without surgery, such as putting the drug particles into stents that go inside arteries.
This new patch could be a major step forward in helping people recover after a heart attack, possibly saving lives and improving heart function in ways not possible before.
If you care about heart health, please read studies about how eating eggs can help reduce heart disease risk, and herbal supplements could harm your heart rhythm.
For more health information, please see recent studies about how drinking milk affects risks of heart disease and cancer, and results showing strawberries could help prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
