VentriGel goes into pigs

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego and Ventrix Inc. have developed a catheter-compatible hydrogel that restored cardiac function in a pig model with myocardial infarction.¹ Ventrix is now scaling up manufacture of the hydrogel, called VentriGel, and hopes to take it into clinical trials by year end.

In prior work, UCSD and Ventrix developed a hydrogel scaffold derived from porcine cardiac extracellular matrix (ECM) and showed that injecting it into rat hearts improved cardiac repair and function.^2,3 The hydrogel was designed to mimic the mammalian heart's native ECM, which is important for proper cardiac function but is lost in the infarct region after a heart attack...