New Strategy For Mending Broken Hearts?

By Samuel Mann

Bioengineers have just discovered how to grow heart tissue made of heart muscle cells called cardiomyocytes. The biomedical engineers at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering have created a "patch" of heart tissue that exhibits the two most important attributes of heart muscle cells; the ability to contract and to conduct electrical impulses. Mouse embryonic stem cells were used in the bioengineering project and this is an important first step to growing living, working heart tissues.

The researches grew cells in an environment much like that found in natural tissues. They used a gel composed of blood-clotting proteins to strengthen the cells and allow them to form a three dimensional structure. Additionally, the researches also found that the cardiomyocytes grew best only when "helper" cells, known as cardiac fibroblasts, were also present. The cardiac fibroblasts are present in 60% of all cells in the human heart and thus allow the heart cells to grow correctly. When tested, the cardiomyocytes were oriented properly by the cardiac fibroblasts and were thus able to contract like normal heart muscles. While this is a step in the right direction, progress still needs to be made to create blood vessels that can sustain the tissue. Hopefully these patches of heart muscles can be produced in large amounts quickly enough to be used for therapeutic restoration of damaged heart tissues due to disease and heart attacks.

Whether people love the ethics of it or not, stem cells are the future of medicine. Over the decades medicine has progressed to smaller and smaller levels within the human body. Inoculations were the first microscopic application of medicine into humans. Antibiotics, penicillin, and blood transfusions took science into the blood and tissues of our bodies. Now, stem cells can take us even deeper to combat diseases that affect us down to our very cell structures. I think the most amazing, and somewhat beautiful, part of stem cell research is that scientists actually use human-made cells. Stem cells aren't some sort of genetic product. Rather, stem cells occur naturally as a vital aspect of human development and growth. Stem cells are meant to be used to create all the cells in the human body and now scientists are beginning to harness these amazing cells to create tissues needed to fight disease. The possible benefits of stem cells and biomedical engineering seem endless and are opening new doors of science and medicine. A whole new era of medical technology is being born right now.

I am very excited about this article. For one, it is really cool. Scientists are actually growing working heart muscles! How cool is that?! I bet I will be alive to see the first fully functional human heart be made by scientists. Second, listen to the title, "Biomedical Engineering." Doesn't it just send shivers down your spine at the sound of its auspicious and high-tech name? Remember when heart transplants were the cool thing? Well now it's bioengineering. Not only am I taking AP Biology this year in high school, but I am also thinking of a career in the medical field. I was thinking about radiology, and still am, but this article has opened my mind and imagination to the possibilities of being a bioengineer.

P.S. I made that GIF. XD

Works Cited:
Duke University. "New Strategy For Mending Broken Hearts?." ScienceDaily 12 October 2009. 12 October 2009 .
Images:
http://www.immediart.com/catalog/images/big_images/SPL_6_P780110-Fibroblast_cells_showing_cytoskeleton.jpg
http://machineslikeus.com/files/imagecache/captioned_image/NLN/17273_rel.jpg
http://www.sciencedaily.com/images/2009/10/091011184432-large.jpg