Bioengineered heart ventricle has potential for therapy studies

A team at Harvard, which has spent over 10 years working on building a whole synthetic working heart, has announced a major step towards that goal by bioengineering a three-dimensional model of the left ventricle of the human heart.

Relying on techniques from fibre production, the team designed a scaffold of nanofibres that mimic the function of natural fibres in the body, which they then seeded with specialised muscle cells derived from induced stem cells that self-organise onto the scaffold to form a structure that beats in vitro.

"We started by learning how to build cardiac myocytes, then cardiac tissues, then muscular pumps in the form of marine organism mimics, and now a ventricle," said team leader Prof Kit Parker, of Harvard’s John A Paulsen School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "Along the way we have elucidated some of the fundamental design laws of muscular pumps and developed ideas about how to fix the heart when these laws are broken by disease.”