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Runaway1956 [soylentnews.org] writes:

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. Milica Radisic and 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.

Scientists have previously grown individual tissues in petri dishes 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 Christopher Moraes, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at McGill University in Montreal. "We think this is because all of our discoveries are made in artificial conditions."

Body-like conditions

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

Radisic and her team tried to create a more suitable environment by growing heart cells in a 3D scaffold or "chip" instead of a flat petri dish. The scaffold is made of a stretchy, biodegradable polymer using techniques similar to those used to fashion computer chips.

Boyang Zhang, a PhD student in Radisic's lab, said he was impressed when he first saw heart cells beating rhythmically together on their scaffold in the lab.

 

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/heart-on-a-chip-1.3461783 [www.cbc.ca]

https://www.rt.com/news/335462-heart-on-chip-medical/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS [rt.com]

video here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC0UMAVSPbQ [youtube.com]

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