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Children with heart defects sometimes need a new heart valve as early as their first year. Unfortunately, such a donor heart valve does not grow with the child. As a result, several major operations are needed during their lifetime. Mats Vervoorn of UMC Utrecht and Marijn Peters of the Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital and Eindhoven ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Technology are working together on a smart solution: a heart valve that does grow with the child and is not rejected by the body.

In the Netherlands, 1 in 100 children are born with a heart defect. A quarter of them have an abnormality of the aortic or pulmonary artery valve. They often have to undergo major surgery in the first year of life to replace the diseased valve with a donor valve to prevent heart failure. The problem is that the donor heart valve does not grow with the child and is also often rejected by the immune system. This requires multiple, high-risk surgeries with new donor heart valves during life, severely limiting the quality of life of these patients.

Mats Vervoorn, heart-lung surgeon in training at UMC Utrecht and Marijn Peters, biomedical researcher are now joining forces to work together to develop a heart valve that grows with them and is not rejected. “The problem with donor valves is that they have to be frozen until they are used in surgery,” explains Vervoorn. “This freezing kills the cells, preventing the valve from growing. We want to develop a small bioreactor to give the heart valve oxygen and nutrients. In this way, we want to keep the heart valve alive for a few weeks to bridge the period between removing the heart valve from the donor body and transplanting it into the child with the congenital heart defect."