Focus on heart-cell insights
Another University of Auckland project supported with a Royal Society Te Apa¯rangi fellowship will use 3D “bioprinting” to gain fresh insights into human heart cells.
Associate Professor Andrew Taberner has begun developing a new instrument for measuring the performance of contracting heart cells.
The heart comprises billions of cardiac muscle cells that coordinate their contractions to pump blood around the body.
But one cardiac muscle cell is not necessarily like another; their behaviour varies throughout the heart, and can deteriorate when the heart is diseased.
A better understanding of the performance of heart cells in different contexts could provide opportunities to develop new treatments for diseases affecting the heart.
Yet the process of making mechanical measurements of isolated heart cells was painstaking and slow.
“We urgently need to develop new high-throughput technologies and tools to speed up the measurement process,” Taberner said.
Over two years, his team will develop a cutting-edge device with which to study living, contracting cells harvested from the heart.
This will include 3-D bioprinting of isolated cells in a format that allows rapid testing of their properties.
This project will involve developing new bioprinting technologies, image processing methods, and new miniature celltesting devices.
The research team plan to bring these together in a system compatible with tools used in biological research and in the pharmaceutical industry.
This device could prove useful for many other types of cells: in food science, it could even be used to develop new forms of lab-grown meat.