Micro Heart Muscle Created from Stem Cells

"We have bioengineered micro-scale heart tissues with a method that can easily be reproduced, which will enable scientists in stem cell biology and the drug industry to study heart cells in their proper context," said first author Nathaniel Huebsch, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Conklin lab at Gladstone Institutes. "In turn, this will enhance our ability to discover treatments for heart disease."

Creating heart cells from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) that are derived from a patient's skin cells enables scientists to study and test drugs on that patient's specific disease. However, cells made from iPSCs are relatively immature, resembling heart cells in an embryo more than cells in an adult. As such, these cells are inadequate for drug testing because they do not properly predict how a drug will affect adult heart cells. Additionally, heart cells created from iPSCs are challenging to make and work with, so creating large quantities can be difficult. Therefore, the fewer cells needed, the better.

The micro heart muscle addresses both of these concerns. Forcing the cells to organize and stretch into three-dimensional tissue helps spur development and coaxes them into resembling more mature cells that can better predict how a drug will affect adult heart cells. Also, the new method--published in the journal Scientific Reports--requires a thousand-fold fewer cells to grow the tissue than other tissue engineering techniques. Using fewer cells allows the scientists to do many more experiments with the same amount of resources.