Scientists have grown mini hearts that beat
The new heart models – each about the size of a sesame seed – were created using ‘self-organising’ cells
Here’s news that should get your blood pumping: researchers from Vienna’s Austrian Academy of
5ciences have groYn tiny & heart like organs in
a Petri dish. Made from human stem cells, these
sesame seed si\ed cardiac models even beat like the
real thing.
5ignificantly unlike previous versions of these tiny
heart organs (called cardioids), the scientists didn’t
use artificial scaffolding to bind the cells together
Instead, the cells organised themselves to grow a hollow chamber.
While useful to earlier studies, cardioids created with the old scaffolding technique did not show the
same physiological responses to damage that a full si\ed human heart does
In an embryo, human organs develop from stem
cells through a process called self organisation
This is where cellular building blocks interact with each other, move and change shape until an organic structure emerges. The scientists in Vienna replicated this process by activating signalling pathways in the stem cells. After one week of development, a hollow organoid grew that contracted rhythmically and was
able to sSuee\e liSuid around its cavity
“5elf organisation is hoY nature makes snoYƃake crystals or birds behave in a ƃock This is difficult to engineer because there seems to be no plan, but still something very ordered and robust comes
out q said lead researcher &r 5asha /endLan
“The self organisation of organs is much more
dynamic, and a lot is going on that we do not understand. We think that this ‘hidden magic’ of development, the stuff we do not yet know about, is the reason why currently diseases are not modelled very well. We want to come up with human heart models that develop more naturally and are
therefore predictive of disease q /endLan added
The scientists already have plans to grow cardioids with multiple chambers to improve our understanding of how heart defects develop in foetuses.