Bioengineering Miniature Human Hearts
The pioneering organisation "Novoheart" have managed to successfully grow miniature human hearts in lab conditions, in the hopes that this revolutionary technology will predict drug safety and improve its efficacy.
To quote, their mission and vision is "to revolutionize drug discovery and development of heart therapeutics with our various proprietary bioengineered human heart constructs, and to further develop them into transplantable grafts for cell-based regenerative heart therapies with superior safety and efficacy."
"Novoheart is the first and only company in the world to have engineered miniature living human heart pumps that can revolutionize drug discovery, helping to save time and money for developing new therapeutics."
It was an extremely complicated and multi-stranded approach that was undertaken to successfully create an artificial, but living heart. The ratio of cells to support structures to nutrients to growing conditions and factors had to all be taken into account. Put very simply, heart cells were grown from stem cells (not human fetal ones to avoid controversy/ethical issues),examples include cardiomyocytes (cells that make up the cardiac muscle to allow contractions), fibroblasts (maintains structural integrity of connective tissues) and endothelial cells to form the blood vessels supplying the heart e.g. coronary arteries and were bind together using a matrix. They are kept within an isotonic solution, monitored at 37 degrees C to mimic the bodily environment.
As mentioned before,due to these hearts being miniature, they obviously cannot be used within our body, but the main reason for their production has been for testing toxicity, efficacy and dosage for drugs, similar to clinical trials but without a human volunteer. Although, this can be used as the basis for scaling up research to hopefully in the near future grow fully functional adult hearts that can be used for transplants, to offload some of the pressure off of donators, which is quite severely lacking at this moment in time (the UTSouthwestern Medical Center state that nearly 4000 people across the U.S are on the waiting list for donor hearts, including a further 400 Texans). Scaling up this method for human use is just as tricky, perhaps even more, than getting to the stage we are at now - a new ratio has to be devised due to different sizes and masses of cells being used, you do not want to lose any functionality.
Within the past decade, this sector of bioengineering has received much more media attention, as well as funding. Why? Perhaps due to the Immunoprin scandal (one of the many) during the 1950s which highlighted that drug trialling was not up to scratch. This German-synthesized drug was marketed as a remedy for nausea for pregnant woman, although it caused tens of thousands of birth defects including a not fully developed brain, extra limbs etc so was pulled from the market in the 1960s. [[ To find more about the Immunoprin scandal and how it caused this birth defects, click this link ]]
Why do we not use mouse hearts, as we use them for a variety of testing and experiments already, for drug testing? They also have a heart? Mouse hearts beat at a faster pace compared to human hearts, so something deemed safe for mice could be a hazard for humans (not to mention it is just genuinely cruel to test on animals).
For the drugs that are only going to be used on humans, its ideally best that we test them on human cells, tissues and organs. After all, there is always going to be variables unaccounted for that we have not even discovered or have much knowledge on yet.
What is truly interesting, is that the procedure to develop these miniature hearts can be modified, and hearts with diseases can also be grown. All of this would contribute to more accurate models which are reflective upon real human organs.
Please refer to the article below for more information onto Novoheart's findings and ambition.
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