A multidisciplinary, multi-institutional group of researchers focused their expertise in genetics, mechanics, chemistry and biology on a chip the size of a postage stamp in order to model a particular class of heart conditions.
In a first for the field, a team led by Guang Li, associate professor in the School of Medicine’s Department of Cell Biology, has grown heart valves on organoids — miniature, simplified versions of a human heart chamber. This work, published August 11 in the journal Cell Stem Cell, is an important step toward better understanding and treating a number of serious heart disorders.
This kind of research often depends on animal models, which allow researchers to study the development of heart valves that grow much quicker than those of humans, which take nearly 10 weeks to fully develop.
Also, Li said, “human valves are very different from animal valves.” Imagine the physiological and genetic differences between a person and, for instance, a zebrafish. “To study human valve diseases, we need human valve models.”
Grown from pluripotent, adult human stem cells, organoids offer just such a model. The stem cells can be generated from skin, blood or other cells, then coaxed into developing into cells from a body part of interest. In this case, a human heart. Different types of organoids can be combined into “assembloids” to better model complex organs that natively originate from combinations of different tissues.
But a living, functioning heart is more than a cluster of certain types of cells. Its development and continued operation is dependent, among other things, on a complex interaction of different forces. To build analogs of those forces into the model, Li sought the engineering expertise of colleagues, including Lance Davidson, the William Kepler Whiteford Professor in the Swanson School of Engineering’s Department of Bioengineering, and Si-Yang Zhen, a professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
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Read the article to find out how they created the model.