Lab Chat: Counting the beats of lab-grown cells

LAB-GROWN HEART CELLS STRETCH ACROSS THE BIOWIRE II DEVICE. (YIMU ZHAO)

Scientists have created a tiny home that helps lab-grown heart tissue develop — and measures how strong it's beating. Here’s what Milica Radisic of the University of Toronto told me about the work, published in Cell.

Tell me how this system works.

It is a heart-on-a-chip platform with the tissue suspended between two wires made of elastic polymers. We used it to grow atrial tissue, ventricular tissue, and tissue with both types in one sample. The tissue beats with the help of electrical field stimulation. And the wires are fluorescent, so we can measure the force of the contraction if we look at their displacement.

How can you use that information?

The main application, which is already happening, is in the drug discovery and drug safety process. We can figure out if a certain treatment is giving a patient arrhythmia, or more contraction, or less contraction. It could also accelerate personalized medicine research if used on a specific patient’s cells.