By Anna Mayor, University Communications and Marketing and USF Health
Meadow EmmaLou Boes is proud of her scar and calls herself a "superhero heart warrior."
Meadow EmmaLou Boes (Photo courtesy of Sarah Boes)
At just six days old, she underwent her first open-heart surgery after being born with a severe congenital heart defect called Tetralogy of Fallot with pulmonary atresia.
Now 4 years old, she has since had two additional major heart surgeries.
"When we got her diagnosis, they told us this was going to be a lifetime of open-heart surgeries," said her mother, Sarah Boes.
For Neda Latifi, assistant professor in the University of South Florida Department of Medical Engineering, children like Meadow are the inspiration behind her research.
Latifi's lab, which is a joint program between USF Health and the College of Engineering, is developing tissue-engineered heart valves that combine advanced biomaterials with a patient's own cells.
The goal is to create a living replacement that integrates with the body and mimics key features of natural heart valve tissue. By encouraging the body's own cells to remodel the valve over time, the technology could eventually adapt as a patient grows - potentially reducing the need for repeated replacement surgeries.
Using cells isolated from umbilical cords and materials designed to mimic healthy heart tissue, Latifi's team is working to create a replacement valve that becomes part of the patient rather than something the body simply tolerates.
Current heart replacement valves come with significant limitations. Mechanical valves typically require patients to take blood-thinning medications for life, while bioprosthetic valves, often made from animal tissue, can deteriorate over time. Neither option grows with a child, meaning young patients may need multiple replacement surgeries.
A 3D print of a damaged heart valve (Photo by Ryan Rossi)
"My major goal is to develop a heart valve that could serve as a one-time replacement, so that one surgery replaces many. Over time, I want the patient's own body to gradually take over and rebuild the valve as living tissue."
Neda Latifi, assistant professor
The research also gives USF biomedical engineering students hands-on experience developing technologies for cardiovascular medicine.
For biomedical engineering undergraduate student Jessica Moore, the motivation comes from knowing how many lives she could impact.
"Knowing that I have the potential to improve the effectiveness of these procedures and help keep thousands of people's hearts beating has driven my passion for this research," Moore said.
Moore is working on the development of artificial blood vessels for coronary artery bypass procedures, creating grafts designed to better match the behavior of natural blood vessels that encourage tissue regeneration.
Undergraduate biomedical engineering student Lucas Niemas is building a compliance tester to evaluate the performance of engineered blood vessels, measuring whether synthetic vascular grafts can withstand the pressures they would encounter inside the human body.
Meadow with her mother Sarah (Photo courtesy of Sarah Boes)
Doctoral student Mario Brock Leao is developing a composite material for replacement heart valves, with the goal of creating valves that combine durability with biocompatibility.
"If patients could have a replacement alternative that didn't require them to consume daily medications or potentially require many reoperations, their lives could significantly change for the better," he said.
For families like the Boes, advances in tissue engineering could eventually transform treatment options for children born with congenital heart defects, allowing them to spend less time in operating rooms and more time simply growing up.
"The more that medicine advances and the fewer surgeries that she has, the greater the chance that we get to rewrite the narrative of her future," said Boes, whose daughter's journey inspired her to became board president of Every 100th Heart, a national advocacy group for people born with congenital heart defects.
While the technology is in the early preclinical stage, Latifi and her team have developed materials designed to reproduce key mechanical features of natural heart valve tissue, with early laboratory studies showing encouraging performance.
