New miniature heart could help speed heart disease cures

I was uncertain if someone already broached this topic, and if it has been discussed I apologize for having missed it.

I found this to be very encouraging. (At my age, these kinds of developments are always encouraging)

New miniature heart could help speed heart disease cures

Now, an interdisciplinary team of engineers, biologists, and geneticists has developed a new way of studying the heart: they've built a miniature replica of a heart chamber from a combination of nanoengineered parts and human heart tissue. There are no springs or external power sources -- like the real thing, it just beats by itself, driven by the live heart tissue grown from stem cells. The device could give researchers a more accurate view of how the organ works, allowing them to track how the heart grows in the embryo, study the impact of disease, and test the potential effectiveness and side effects of new treatments -- all at zero risk to patients and without leaving a lab.

A fascinating approach to creating a 'custom' heart device for research and testing has been developed, and the process itself seems well-suited to be applicable to other organs as well.

"We can study disease progression in a way that hasn't been possible before," says Alice White, a BU College of Engineering professor and chair of mechanical engineering. "We chose to work on heart tissue because of its particularly complicated mechanics, but we showed that, when you take nanotechnology and marry it with tissue engineering, there's potential for replicating this for multiple organs."

According to the researchers, the device could eventually speed up the drug development process, making it faster and cheaper. Instead of spending millions -- and possibly decades -- moving a medicinal drug through the development pipeline only to see it fall at the final hurdle when tested in people, researchers could use the miniPUMP at the outset to better predict success or failure.

There is an even better perspective on this as well... personalized medical treatment ...

"With this system, if I take cells from you, I can see how the drug would react in you, because these are your cells," says Michas. "This system replicates better some of the function of the heart, but at the same time, gives us the flexibility of having different humans that it replicates. It's a more predictive model to see what would happen in humans -- without actually getting into humans."

I almost want to quote the whole damn article... but that is not our way here... please take a moment to see where this could go.. and perhaps even to give us hope that heart disease can now be treated much more successfully.

"There are so many research applications," says Chen. "In addition to giving us access to human heart muscle for studying disease and pathology, this work paves the way to making heart patches that could ultimately be for someone who had a defect in their current heart."

a reply to: Maxmars

Great post, thank you. This is incredible. I wonder if they can create a bigger heart to replace the black heart which is in Putens chest.

I just ran across this article:

Progress with organoids: A mini-heart in a Petri dish

I thought it might be a rehash of the source above... but it is completely different...

A team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has induced stem cells to emulate the development of the human heart. The result is a sort of "mini-heart" known as an organoid. ..

In this article authors report

Prof. Moretti and her team are the first researchers in the world to successfully create an organoid containing both heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) and cells of the outer layer of the heart wall (epicardium). In the young history of heart organoids—the first were described in 2021—researchers had previously created only organoids with cardiomyocytes and cells from the inner layer of the heart wall (endocardium).

Which makes me wonder about the nature of the cells the OP is referring to... are they using only one kind of cells? Or did they avail themselves of techniques like the one's in this article?

Interesting synchronicity in reporting... I really don't believe in coincidence much ...