Tag Archives: Yoshiko Iwamoto

Gluing blood vessels with mussel goo

The University of British Columbia [UBC] Dec. 11, 2012 news release states,

A University of British Columbia researcher has helped create a gel – based on the mussel’s knack for clinging to rocks, piers and boat hulls – that can be painted onto the walls of blood vessels and stay put, forming a protective barrier with potentially life-saving implications.

Co-invented by Assistant Professor Christian Kastrup while a postdoctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the gel is similar to the amino acid that enables mussels to resist the power of churning water. The variant that Kastrup and his collaborators created, described in the current issue of the online journal PNAS [Proceeings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US] Early Edition, can withstand the flow of blood through arteries and veins.

Here’s the citation and a link to the article (which is behind a paywall),

Painting blood vessels and atherosclerotic plaques with an adhesive drug depot by Christian J. Kastrup, Matthias Nahrendorf, Jose Luiz Figueiredo, Haeshin Lee, Swetha Kambhampati, Timothy Lee, Seung-Woo Cho, Rostic Gorbatov, Yoshiko Iwamoto, Tram T. Dang, Partha Dutta, Ju Hun Yeon, Hao Cheng, Christopher D. Pritchard, Arturo J. Vegas, Cory D. Siegel, Samantha MacDougall, Michael Okonkwo, Anh Thai, James R. Stone, Arthur J. Coury, Ralph Weissleder, Robert Langer, and Daniel G. Anderson.  PNAS, December 11, 2012 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1217972110

For those of a more technical turn of mind, here’s the abstract (from PNAS),

The treatment of diseased vasculature remains challenging, in part because of the difficulty in implanting drug-eluting devices without subjecting vessels to damaging mechanical forces. Implanting materials using adhesive forces could overcome this challenge, but materials have previously not been shown to durably adhere to intact endothelium under blood flow. Marine mussels secrete strong underwater adhesives that have been mimicked in synthetic systems. Here we develop a drug-eluting bioadhesive gel that can be locally and durably glued onto the inside surface of blood vessels. In a mouse model of atherosclerosis, inflamed plaques treated with steroid-eluting adhesive gels had reduced macrophage content and developed protective fibrous caps covering the plaque core. Treatment also lowered plasma cytokine levels and biomarkers of inflammation in the plaque. The drug-eluting devices developed here provide a general strategy for implanting therapeutics in the vasculature using adhesive forces and could potentially be used to stabilize rupture-prone plaques.

The news release describes the work layperson’s terms,

The gel’s “sheer strength” could shore up weakened vessel walls at risk of rupturing – much like the way putty can fill in dents in a wall, says Kastrup, a member of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Michael Smith Laboratories.

By forming a stable barrier between blood and the vessel walls, the gel could also prevent the inflammation that typically occurs when a stent is inserted to widen a narrowed artery or vein; that inflammation often counteracts the opening of the vessel that the stent was intended to achieve.

The widest potential application would be preventing the rupture of blood vessel plaque. When a plaque ruptures, the resulting clot can block blood flow to the heart (triggering a heart attack) or the brain (triggering a stroke). Mice treated with a combination of the gel and an anti-inflammatory steroid had more stable plaque than a control group of untreated mice.

“By mimicking the mussel’s ability to cling to objects, we created a substance that stays in place in a very dynamic environment with high flow velocities,” says Kastrup, a member of UBC’s Centre for Blood Research.

Robert Langer, one of the paper’s co-authors, was mentioned here in an Aug. 27, 2012 posting about nanoelectronics, tissue engineering, and medicine.