Muthu Vignesh Vellayappan is among 12 finalists who have made it to the finals of the Famelab Australia competition.
The science competition, organised by the British Council is run annually in Australia and in over 30 countries worldwide, aims to discover budding scientists who have the potential to inspire people.
Muthu, the only Indian-Australian to make it to the finals, is a postgraduate student at Monash University in Melbourne.
He's been chosen for his work on heart disease and treatment using heart ''patches".
Watch Muthu live tomorrow (10th May) at 20.15 AEST / 18.15 AWST at http://bit.ly/2Hwh13q
Describing his work, the British Council says:
"Heart diseases are killing 1 Australian every 12 minutes. Heart transplantation remains the only definitive treatment but donors are limited and most patients die while waiting for a suitable heart. Heart patches can be used to treat heart patients but the heart muscle cells don’t efficiently align on the patch, leading to poor healing".
The website adds that "Muthu’s research attempts to fill this void by using 3D printing and post-processing techniques to produce an effective grooved cardiac patch material"
SBS Hindi got in touch with Muthu Vellayappan on making it to the FameLab finals.
"At present there are problems with the current treatments for treating patients with heart attack," he said.
3D printing
"I am currently working on 3D Printing, what we are doing here is we 3D Print a scaffold or a design or a model, later on we just remove one material and then we just feed the heart cells on the material just for the application of cardiac patches application.
"In the first approach they used to inject the heart cells into the damaged location but the heart cells don't stay put and they tend to migrate to some other location. So in the second approach what the researchers have done is that they have used a cardiac patch and they placed over the damaged location - but in this case the alignment of the cells, of the heart cells, is quite important, it doesn't happen in case of the current cardiac patches.
Source: Muthu Vellayappan
"So my research mainly aims to get the aligned heart cells just to be a more effective cardiac patch, so that we can fix this heart problem."
"We will print a model and then we will place the heart cells on the model. Later on we will use this heart cells loaded models as a cardiac patch," he adds.
"However it could be a while before this device hits the market."
Mr Vellayappan said "any medical device which we are inventing or developing it takes a lot of time testing, that's because it involves a human as well. So as of now, we are in the initial stage."
