Engineering Hearts

If a heart attack doesn’t kill a person, it’s likely that subsequent heart failure ultimately will. That’s because damage caused to heart muscle is, largely speaking, irreversible. Heart cells have an extremely limited ability to regenerate, so those destroyed by injury tend to be replaced with nonfunctional scar tissue. In a quest to minimise scar formation and maximise heart function, scientists have tried injecting damaged hearts with human stem cells – the aim being to promote the growth of new heart cells. This scheme has met with limited success, however. Using such stem cells to instead create engineered heart tissue (pictured) might offer a more promising approach. When strips of human engineered heart tissue were engrafted into injured guinea pig hearts they were shown to integrate with the host tissue (sharing blood vessels and electrical activity) and, more importantly, to improve the organs’ blood-pumping abilities.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Florian Weinberger, Kaja Breckwoldt and Simon Pecha, and colleagues
• Department of Experimental Pharmacology and Toxicology, Cardiovascular Research Center, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany
• Image copyright held by original authors
• Research published in Science Translational Medicine, November 2016