Cardiosaplat
Fully functional artificial human heart muscle grown as a "patch" of reprogrammed cells
Marina Astvatsaturyan, Echo of Moscow
Researchers from Duke University reported in the journal Nature Communications that they managed to create an artificial human heart muscle, the size of which covers the area damaged by myocardial infarction (Ilya Y. Shadrin et al., Cardiopatch platform enables maturation and scale-up of human pluripotent stem cell-derived engineered heart tissues).
"While the use of cardiomyocytes derived from human pluripotent stem cells is becoming increasingly widespread in the testing of new drugs and research on disease models, therapy is acutely lacking in functional heart muscle tissue," the authors write.
The Cardiopatch platform ("Cardiosaplat") presented by them for three-dimensional cultivation and cultivation to a mature state of cardiomyocytes from induced stem cells allows for five weeks to obtain a material with normal electromechanical activity that has all the attributes of a healthy heart muscle, including zones, strips and tubes necessary for its contraction.
According to the authors, the maturation indicators and functionality of the grown samples increase with cultivation, reaching the level of an adult myocardium. Moreover, blood vessels formed and expanded in the cardiosaplat of a live mouse. In experiments on rats, it was shown that the transplantation of a cardioplat does not affect the likelihood of arrhythmias.
"Currently, almost all existing treatment methods are aimed at reducing the symptoms of damage that has already occurred to the heart due to a rupture of the heart muscle, and none of them is able to repair the damaged area, because after the death of the heart muscle cells themselves will not revive," explains the Beating Heart Patch is press release Large Enough to Repair the Human Heart the first author of the article Ilya Shadrin.
The dead area is scarred, but the scarred tissue does not conduct electrical signals and does not contract, and these are two properties necessary for a normal heartbeat. The approach developed by Shadrin under the guidance of Professor Nenad Bursac (Nenad Bursac) with the cultivation of a cardioplast outside the body will prevent fatal post-infarction complications.
Currently, other cellular methods are undergoing clinical trials, which are based on the introduction of stem cells isolated from bone marrow, blood or the heart itself, directly into the lesion site to replenish the lost part of the muscle. Despite a certain positive effect of such treatment, its mechanisms are not fully understood, and less than one percent of the introduced cells survive in the heart, and even less turns into heart muscle cells.
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