By Ben Brumfield | Photos by Rob Felt and Allison Carter | Illustrations by Harriss Callahan and Monet Fort | Published Feb. 14, 2019

[Disclaimer: These are emerging solutions. No implements presented in this article are currently available for patient treatment.]

y this time tomorrow, your heart will have beaten 100,000 times. In an average lifetime, that’s 2.5 billion full contractions. The heart is the first organ that forms in the embryo, and life ultimately ends with its last beat.

“It’s an amazing electromechanical pump that keeps on going in some people for 60, 70, or 80 years without needing a single repair. I can’t think of any human-made device, be it a valve, a pump, or anything, that can do that without breaking down,” said Ajit Yoganathan, a Regents Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a cardiology researcher for more than 40 years.

“Obviously, though, in some cases, things do go wrong with the heart, but like any living system, it has self-repair mechanisms. It can rebuild itself after a heart attack,” Yoganathan said.

Killer No. 1

Yet, heart disease remains the number one killer, taking 610,000 lives a year. That’s more than number two, cancer, and in the United States, more than the next five causes of death combined, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

CDC Deaths and Mortality in the U.S. Data source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Long-term, researchers at Georgia Tech and Emory University are exploring the root causes of major heart disorders like blocked arteries, or atherosclerosis, and valve impairment. But more immediately, translational researchers are engineering methods to detect and fix the damage that heart disease is doing.

“Some underlying heart diseases may never be eliminated, but we can delay them and extend life,” said Yoganathan, who has been a key facilitator at Georgia Tech in translating cardiological research into possible patient benefits, particularly in cooperation with Emory in their jointly run Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Researcher Vahid Serpooshan sets up a medical 3D printer that will print a patch engineered to strengthen heart muscle damaged in a heart attack. (Photo by Rob Felt, Georgia Tech)

6 medical advancements

Here, engineers, scientists, and doctors present emerging cardiological solutions that have the potential of one day reaching patients.

All of the following cardiological solutions are currently unavailable for patient treatment. They are in preclinical and clinical trials or other human test phases, and if they succeed, it could be years before they are available to patients.

But even if these developments never make it to market, the underlying research is readily accessible and can inspire the improvement of existing or future therapies to save more patients’ lives.