Human cardiac cells grown on heart ‘scaffold’
30 Mar 2016 by Evoluted New Media
Heart cells have been successfully grown in a human heart stripped of all cellular components by scientists at the Massachusetts General Hospital.
Heart cells have been successfully grown in a human heart stripped of all cellular components by scientists at the Massachusetts General Hospital.
Using detergent, scientists removed all cells and human leukocyte antigens from 73 human hearts. The ‘matrix’ of the heart was then repopulated with pluripotent stem cells induced to differentiate into cardiac muscle. The scientists behind the work hope to create cardiac muscle to repair damaged tissue.
Professor Jacques Guyette, from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and lead author of this study, said: “Regenerating a whole heart is most certainly a long-term goal that is several years away, so we are currently working on engineering a functional myocardial patch that could replace cardiac tissue damaged due a heart attack or heart failure.”
In 2008, Dr Harold Ott, also from the MGH, developed a procedure to strip all cells from organs, leaving just the ‘scaffolding’ behind. To date, his technique has been used on hearts, lungs, livers, pancreases and kidneys.
MicroRNA molecules were used to reprogramme adult skin cells to created induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC). It is hoped this method, as well as being more efficient, will be less likely to encounter regulatory issues.
After the cells had differentiated into cardiomyocytes, they were placed back into the heart matrix. These fibres developed into spontaneously contracting tissue after several days in culture. The matrix hearts were incubated in a bioreactor system that perfused the organ with a nutrient solution and applied environmental pressures the heart would be subject to in vivo.
Dr Ott said: “Generating personalised functional myocardium from patient-derived cells is an important step towards novel device-engineering strategies and will potentially enable patient-specific disease modelling and therapeutic discovery.”
Professor Guyette said some of the next steps would include improving methods to generate more cardiac cells and optimising bioreactors to improve the maturation and function of engineered cardiac tissue.
The research was published in Circulation Research
