Guided Tissue Regeneration in Heart Valve Replacement: From Preclinical Research to First-in-Human Trials

Heart valve tissue-guided regeneration aims to offer a functional and viable alternative to current prosthetic replacements. Not requiring previous cell seeding and conditioning in bioreactors, such exceptional tissue engineering approach is a very fascinating translational regenerative strategy. After in vivo implantation, decellularized heart valve scaffolds drive their same repopulation by recipient’s cells for a prospective autologous-like tissue reconstruction, remodeling, and adaptation to the somatic growth of the patient. With such a viability, tissue-guided regenerated conduits can be delivered as off-the-shelf biodevices and possess all the potentialities for a long-lasting resolution of the dramatic inconvenience of heart valve diseases, both in children and in the elderly. A review on preclinical and clinical investigations of this therapeutic concept is provided with evaluation of the issues still to be well deliberated for an effective and safe in-human application

modeling cardiac congenital diseases from mathematic tools to human induced pluripotent stem cells

Cardiac congenital diseases are rare inherited disorders characterized by anatomical malformations and/or by electrophysiological abnormalities, both affecting the whole heart function. In order to clarify the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms, experimental modeling has been proposed throughin silico,in vitro, and/orin vivosimulations. Bioinformatics, transgenesis, heterologous expression systems, mammalian models, and, recently, pluripotent stem cells have been advanced to effectively recapitulate several human congenital diseases (such as Brugada syndrome, CPVT, LQTs, and ARVC) and, potentially, provide new insights into their pathomechanisms for novel therapeutic perspectives

Cutting-Edge Regenerative Medicine Technologies for the Treatment of Heart Valve Calcification

http://Laura Iop and Gino Gerosa (2013). Cutting-Edge Regenerative Medicine Technologies for the Treatment of Heart Valve Calcification, Calcific Aortic Valve Disease, Dr. Elena Aikawa (Ed.), ISBN: 978-953-51-1150-4, InTech, DOI: 10.5772/55327. Available from: http://www.intechopen.com/books/calcific-aortic-valve-disease/cutting-edge-regenerative-medicine-technologies-for-the-treatment-of-heart-valve-calcificatio

Geometry of Higher-Dimensional Black Hole Thermodynamics

We investigate thermodynamic curvatures of the Kerr and Reissner-Nordstr\"om (RN) black holes in spacetime dimensions higher than four. These black holes possess thermodynamic geometries similar to those in four dimensional spacetime. The thermodynamic geometries are the Ruppeiner geometry and the conformally related Weinhold geometry. The Ruppeiner geometry for $d=5$ Kerr black hole is curved and divergent in the extremal limit. For $d \geq 6$ Kerr black hole there is no extremality but the Ruppeiner curvature diverges where one suspects that the black hole becomes unstable. The Weinhold geometry of the Kerr black hole in arbitrary dimension is a flat geometry. For RN black hole the Ruppeiner geometry is flat in all spacetime dimensions, whereas its Weinhold geometry is curved. In $d \geq 5$ the Kerr black hole can possess more than one angular momentum. Finally we discuss the Ruppeiner geometry for the Kerr black hole in $d=5$ with double angular momenta.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, RevTex, References adde

Fatigue in cancer patients receiving chemotherapy: an analysis of published studies

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