Beating heart tissue grown in lab

New direction in repairing damaged hearts? I remember reading of the first doctor (as far as we know) to touch a beating human heart - they worried that touching it would make it stop beating - such a wondrous moment!

Beating heart tissue grown in lab

Heart cells grew into cardiac tissue

Scientists have cultured small pieces of heart tissue which beat in the same way as the whole organ. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology team hope the work will lead to new ways of repairing heart damage.

They grew the tissue from a few rat heart cells which were placed on an artificial scaffold, and then stimulated with an electric current.

Researchers told Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: "Think of it as a patch for a broken heart."

The real advance here is we mimicked what the body does itself and got it to work.

Dr Robert Langer
Myocardium, or heart muscle cells, cannot regenerate after injury, limiting the effectiveness of standard therapies.

And heart cells are difficult to culture by conventional methods because they tend to lose their shape and stop functioning.

Polymer scaffold

Researcher Dr Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic said: "We have been trying to engineer a patch of tissue that has the same properties as native heart tissue, or myocardium, that could be attached over injured myocardium."

The MIT approach involves seeding cardiac cells from a rat onto a 3D polymer scaffold, which slowly biodegrades as the cells develop into a full tissue.

The cell/scaffold constructs, which are a little smaller than a penny piece and about the same thickness, were bathed in a medium that supplies nutrients and gases.

The researchers then applied electrical signals designed to mimic those in a native heart.

They had no idea whether the approach would work, but it turned out that electrical stimulation was crucial for the development of fully functioning cardiac tissue.

After only eight days of cultivation, single cells grew into a tissue with a remarkable level of structural and functional organisation............

Full story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4091497.stm