Major breakthrough may lead to artificial hearts.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Researchers have used stem cells to create tiny human hearts that can beat from nothing; the breakthrough may revolutionize the field of medicine in the near future.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with scientists at the Gladstone Institutes, say their template for growing beating cardiac tissue from stem cells, creates a system that could serve as a model for early heart development and a drug-screening tool to make pregnancies safer, reported the Daily Mail.
The techniques could also eventually be used to create a full-sized heart, scientists proposed to the New Scientist.
“Our model is the first step towards building a heart relying on self-organisation of cells, without any external three-dimensional supporting materials,” Zhen Ma, from the University of California at Berkeley, told the magazine.
Dr. Bruce Conklin, a stem cell biologist at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease in San Francisco, along with colleagues developed the tiny hearts using stem cells derived from skin tissue, reported Discovery News. The scientists allowed the cells to grow in a petri dish, adding a chemical layer containing slight physical and chemical differences, thanks to tiny etchings made with oxygen plasma.
The team present their findings in a paper, “Self-organizing human cardiac microchambers mediated by geometric confinement,” published in Nature Communications this week.
This isn’t the first time stem cells have been used to help develop hearts. In the past, researchers have used stem cells to create sheets of beating heart muscle in petri dishes, as well as tubes of heart cells resembling tiny pumps.
Now, with the latest advance in stem cell biotechnology, scientists are one step closer to creating real, working hearts that might be able to replace ailing organ in the future.