Patching up the injured heart

Patching up the myocardium.

Cell therapy, while retaining promise for cardiac regeneration, has thus far been encumbered by variable and unpredictable fates of delivered cells. In a recent issue of PNAS, Godier-Furnémont and colleagues describe a new strategy to regulate cell delivery by promoting specific migration and growth factor secretion behaviors of implanted cells from a decellularized matrix via biochemical preco...

Patching Up X-trees

A fundamental problem in many areas of classification, and particularly in biology, is the reconstruction of a leaf-labeled tree from just a subset of its induced subtrees. Without loss of generality, we may assume that these induced subtrees all have precisely four leaves. Of particular interest is the question of determining whether a collection of quartet subtrees uniquely defines a parent t...

Enhancing Patching Performance Through Double Patching

Patching is an efficient bandwidth-sharing technique for video-on-demand systems. Its performance, however, has limitation: as the time distance to the last regular multicast enlarges, the patching cost for new requests increases and eventually, a new regular multicast must be scheduled to balance the cost. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a new technique called Double Patchi...

A repair tool-(c)kit for the injured heart.

Renovation of the injured heart with myocardial tissue engineering.

Tissue engineering aims to create, repair and/or replace tissues and organs by using cells, scaffolds, biologically active molecules and physiologic signals. It is an interdisciplinary field that integrates aspects of engineering, chemistry, biology and medicine. One of the most challenging goals in the field of cardiovascular tissue engineering is the creation of a heart muscle patch. This rev...