Beating 'heart on a chip' developed by Canadian scientists

Canadian scientists have developed a way to grow swatches of living heart tissue containing muscle and "blood vessels" that beat rhythmically like a real heart.

University of Toronto Prof.MilicaRadisicand her team hope to use the technology to grow various kinds of "mini organs" that function the way tissues do inside the human body. That would allow them to be used for drug testing or even for growing replacement tissues to treat people who have suffered a heart attack, for example.

Beating heart cells

9 years ago

Duration 0:11

U of T scientists develop 'heart-on-a-chip'

Scientists have previously grown individual tissues inpetridishes in order to test whether different chemical compounds could potentially function as drugs.

But very few compounds that work in those conditions actually develop into marketable drugs, said ChristopherMoraes, an assistant professor of chemical engineering atMcGillUniversity in Montreal. "We think this is because all of our discoveries are made in artificial conditions."

Body-like conditions

Moraeswas not involved in the new study, but his research, likeRadisic's, focuses on how to grow cells in conditions that more closely mimic the human body.

Radisicand her team tried to create a more suitableenvironment by growing heart cells in a 3D scaffold or "chip" instead of a flatpetridish. The scaffold is made of a stretchy, biodegradable polymer using techniques similar to those used to fashion computer chips.

Boyang Zhang, a PhDstudent inRadisic'slab, said he was impressed when he first saw heart cells beating rhythmically together on their scaffold inthelab.

"It's amazing, because you rarely see cells actually move," he said.

Zhang, lead author of the new study, helped improve the scaffold with pores that act as blood vessels and can be usedto connect with other cells.

"That is a critical component in our tissues," he toldCBC'sChristineBirak.

The researchers call the new, improved versionAngioChip and described it in a new paper published this week in the journal Nature Materials. It has been tested with both heart and liver tissues.

Implantabletissues

The researchers showed that the engineered heart tissues could be implanted in and connected to the blood vessel network of a living rat.

"This is the first time we see that we can actually connect this directly to the body and actually see the blood flow through,"Zheungsaid.

Moraessaid that's an advantage over previous technology.

"Instead of having an organ on a chip, I think they have set us up to have chips in an organ, where we can design most of the environment, put it into an actual living animal or eventually even a person and really study much more complexfacetsabout the biology in a very realistic setting."

Right now,Zhangsaid, the researchers are seeing if they can do drug testing on simple versions ofAngioChipthat contain just a strip of tissue. In the future, the researchers hope to be able to work with more complex versions that connect different tissues from different organs to study how they interact.

And beyond that, they hope to be able to grow tissues outside the human body to treat someone who has had a heart attack, for example.

"We can create artificial heart muscles in the lab and could potentially use it to replace the damaged tissue from the patient."

However, the researchers haven't yet started trying to implant their engineered tissues in humans, andZhangsaid he wasn't sure how far away that type of treatment might be.

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