Spinach can really be heart healthy

Scientists turn leafy veins into beating cardiac muscle cells

If an overhyped vegetable existed before marketers coined the term superfood — and long before Oprah Winfrey chatted up acai berries with Dr. Oz — look no further than spinach.

Popeye aside, Spinach alone won’t pump anyone up.

But it does have a few physical properties that excite biomedical engineers.

Spinach grows a network of veins, for instance, that thread through its leaves in a way similar to blood vessels through a human heart.

These leafy veins allowed researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts to give a new meaning to heart-healthy spinach.

The tissue engineers, as they reported recently in the journal Biomaterials, stripped green spinach leaves of their cells. The spinach turned translucent.

The scientists seeded the gaps that the plant cells left behind with human heart tissue. Heart cells, in clusters, beat for up to three weeks.

The inspiration for the human-plant fusion came when WPI bioengineers Glenn Gaudette and Joshua Gershlak began to brainstorm new ways to tackle a deadly medical problem: the lack of donor organs.

Of the more than 100,000 people on the donor list, nearly two dozen people die each day while waiting for an organ transplant.

Scientists have tried to create artificial organs through innovations such as 3D-printing tissue. So far, however, no one has been able to print a perfect heart. Current technology cannot construct tissue dense enough to replace a heart while also allowing for the tiny blood vessels needed to deliver life-giving oxygen.

Rather than creating minuscule blood vessels, the scientists decided to borrow from what nature already evolved. They removed the cells from spinach leaves purchased at a local market.

Left behind was cellulose, a plant material known to be compatible with mammal tissue, as well as the intact leaf veins. The scientists seeded the now-vacated cellulose matrix with cardiac muscle cells. After five days, the muscle cells began to beat.