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The new heart tissue strand contracts at about 100 beats per minute. Like normal heart muscle, the new tissue is striated, or made up of long bands of fibers, and shows evidence of cell-to-cell coupling. "The purpose of our study was to explore the possibility that one could take isolated heart cells and allow them to coalesce and attach to each other in a functional way, thereby creating an artificial tissue," Cascio says. It's too early to have any practical application in treating heart ailments in people, but Cascio's model may prove valuable for cardiac disease research, especially into electrical and mechanical disturbances of the heart.
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ake
heart — cardiac research just got a little more
advanced. Wayne Cascio and his research team have figured out how
to grow heart muscle outside the body, and here's the twist: it
beats. Cascio, associate professor of medicine, isolated heart cells
from one-day-old rats, mixed the cells into a culture, then grew
them on a tissue train plate, a flat panel with several tissue-incubating
circular wells. After four days in culture, the heart cells moved
to the center of the well and formed a dense cord of heart tissue
that extended to either side.
Jason
Smith is online designer and print production manager of Endeavors
magazine.
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