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British Heart Foundation Week A Hearty Scaffold
08 February 2015

A Hearty Scaffold

This scaffolding might not look much like the stuff that construction workers might put up around a building – and the microscopic holes and struts are made of special biologically active materials rather than metal bolts and pipes – but it's just as useful. It’s a biological scaffold that’s been designed to support the construction of replacement heart parts, grown in the lab. The hope is that tissue created in this way could one day be implanted into a patient's heart after a heart attack, patching up the damage in the same way that builders repair the damage to a house after a storm. It's not just the heart either – researchers are working on growing other types of cells, including bone and the muscles elsewhere in the body.

Written by Kat Arney

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BPoD stands for Biomedical Picture of the Day. Managed by the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences until Jul 2023, it is now run independently by a dedicated team of scientists and writers. The website aims to engage everyone, young and old, in the wonders of biology, and its influence on medicine. The ever-growing archive of more than 4000 research images documents over a decade of progress. Explore the collection and see what you discover. Images are kindly provided for inclusion on this website through the generosity of scientists across the globe.

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