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Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States are close to mending broken hearts.
They have managed to create a small swatch of heart tissue that displays many of the hallmarks of mature cardiac tissue, including regular contractions, according to a report in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers have been trying to engineer a patch of tissue that has the same properties as native heart tissue, or myocardium, that could be attached over injured myocardium.
The MIT approach involves seeding cardiac cells, in this case from a rat, onto a 3D polymer scaffold that slowly biodegrades as the cells develop into a full tissue. The cell/scaffold constructs, which are a little smaller than a dime (a US ten cents coin) and about the same thickness, are bathed in a medium that supplies nutrients and gases.
In a patent-pending technique, the researchers then apply electrical signals designed to mimic those in a native heart. This they do by connecting the constructs to a pacemaker.
After only eight days of cultivation, single cells grew into a tissue 'with a remarkable level of structural and functional organization', the report said.
"But the greatest challenge is to reproduce this with human cells, and test how all this works in the body," it added.