Background and importance for society
Every year around 300.000 European citizens receive electronic pacemaker therapies. These therapies were introduced into clinical medicine in the 1950s and 1960s and since then have gradually been improved. Regardless of these improvements, they are still not without important limitations such as inadequate sensitivity to autonomic modulation, a limited battery lifetime, which requires replacement every 5-7 years, and a non-physiological implantation site that is associated with significant adverse remodeling. Moreover, five per cent of the electronic pacemaker implantations result in serious complications that require reimplantation or other invasive procedures. In an effort to resolve the shortcomings of electronic pacemakers, extensive efforts have been put into the development of biological pacemakers using gene and cell-based therapies. Several of these developments have shown robust function in short-term animal trials and it appears only a matter of time before clinical trials will be initiated. The focus of current biological pacemaker research has been on pacing of the atrium and ventricle, thereby representing approximately 20% of the patients that now need electronic pacemaker therapies. Yet the majority of patients would benefit from repair of atrioventricular (AV) conduction, but this has been difficult to achieve biologically.
Objective
This ERC starting grant aims to develop cell-based biological pacemakers and AV bypass tracts in an effort to develop better treatments for bradyarrhythmia patients.
