Building Hearts | Kit Parker | TEDxBoston

Quick Overview

Kit Parker's presentation outlines the long-term, modular engineering approach to building a living, synthetic heart, focusing on creating functional components like vascular grafts, valves, and muscle tissue scaffolds that can eventually be assembled into a transplantable organ, addressing the historical lack of understanding regarding the heart's complex, non-laminar architecture and the challenges of treating congenital heart defects in children.

Key Points: Parker's group is working on building living, synthetic hearts for transplant, aiming to overcome the limitations of current treatments for congenital heart defects that affect approximately 40,000 children annually in the US. The historical understanding of the heart has been flawed, often treating it as a simple pump or relying on assumptions that incorrectly model its complex, helical, and laminar architecture. The research focuses on a modular engineering approach, successfully creating and testing components like vascular grafts (09:50) and heart valves that work after implantation in animal models (08:35). Valve fabrication, using techniques like fiber spinning and embossing, can be achieved in minutes, producing structures with native-like extracellular matrix (ECM) components (07:35). The inherent complexity of the heart's native architecture—including its helical muscle layer and its need to feed itself first (consuming 10% of oxygen/nutrients per beat)—necessitates building components with precise cellular alignment. The team is progressing from building individual components to creating a four-chamber pump model (14:18), which requires integrating multiple engineered parts. The ultimate goal is a living, synthetic heart that can grow with the patient, eliminating the need for repeated surgeries to replace outgrown artificial valves.

Context: Kit Parker, from the Disease Biophysics Group at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, discusses his team's ambitious, multi-decade effort in regenerative engineering to construct a functional, living, synthetic heart. He contrasts this engineering-driven, modular approach with older, flawed anatomical assumptions about the heart's structure, emphasizing the need to replicate the heart's complex, non-laminar architecture to create durable replacements for children born with congenital heart defects.