Tag Archives: Regenerative Medicine Institute

My carbon nanotube heart and patents

The stem cell scientists at the National University of Ireland (NUI) and Trinity College Dublin’s CRANN (Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices) aren’t making hearts out of carbon nanotubes but they are using the particles to stimulate stem cells into becoming heart-like.The Sept. 19, 2012 news item on Nanowerk provides context for this work,

Stem cell scientists have capitalised on the electrical properties of a widely used nanomaterial to develop cells which may allow the regeneration of cardiac cells. The breakthrough has been led by a team of scientists at the Regenerative Medicine Institute (REMEDI) at the National University of Ireland Galway in conjunction with Trinity College Dublin.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in Ireland. Once damaged by heart attack, cardiac muscle has very little capacity for self-repair and at present there are no clinical treatments available to repair damaged cardiac muscle tissue.

Over the last 10 years, there has been tremendous interest in developing a cell-based therapy to address this problem. Since the use of a patient’s own heart cells is not a viable clinical option, many researchers are working to try to find an alternative source of cells that could be used for cardiac tissue repair.

The NUI Sept. 19, 2012 news release, which originated the news item, describes how carbon nanotubes have properties similar to certain heart cells and how the researchers decided to exploit that similarity,

The researchers recognised that carbon nanotubes, a widely used nanoparticle, is reactive to electrical stimulation. They then used these nanomaterials to create cells with the characteristics of cardiac progenitors, a special type of cell found in the heart, from adult stem cells.

“The electrical properties of the nanomaterial triggered a response in the mesenchymal (adult) stem cells, which we sourced from human bone marrow. In effect, they became electrified, which made them morph into more cardiac-like cells”, explains Valerie Barron of REMEDI at National University of Ireland Galway. “This is a totally new approach and provides a ready-source of tailored cells, which have the potential to be used as a new clinical therapy. Excitingly, this symbiotic strategy lays the foundation stone for other electroactive tissue repair applications, and can be readily exploited for other clinically challenging areas such as in the brain and the spinal cord.”

The team’s collaborator at CRANN, Professor Werner Blau made a comment I found a bit odd (from the NUI news release),

“It is great to see two decades of our pioneering nanocarbon research here at TCD come to fruition in a way that addresses a major global health problem. Hopefully many people around the world will ultimately benefit from it. Some of our carbon nanotube research has been patented by TCD and is being licensed to international companies in material science, electronics and health care,” said Professor Blau.

I’m not a big fan of the current patenting regimes which seem to  have been turned  into innovation-killing machines.  As for patenting medicines and medical devices, I recall that Frederick Banting and Charles Best who discovered insulin refused to patent the discovery as they believed it would constrain access.

I appreciate that businesses need to make money and scientists need money to do their work and so on but this blind rush to patent discoveries seems a little misguided to me and it might be a good time to consider new business and economic models.