Colourful Heart

If you raise your arm in the air, could the heart on your sleeve fall onto the chip on your shoulder? Heart-on-a-chip is actually a small construction that reproduces key mechanisms of the heart in order to test medicines quickly, and better understand the behaviour of heart cells. Simplifying the system while improving the accuracy of imitation and ease of use would widen the accessibility of the technology, broadening use and accelerating treatment development. A new approach employs a structural colour hydrogel – a material that changes colour depending on shape – on the reverse of a sheet of aligned nanotubes, on which heart cells grow. The shape and conductive properties of the sheet allow heart cells to align neatly and beat in time with each other, with a brilliant colour change accompanying each sheet-folding beat (pictured). It’s a living, beating, visual testing platform for a wide range of diseases and treatments.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Video from work by Lingyu Sun and colleagues
• Department of Rheumatology and Immunology, Institute of Translational Medicine, The Affiliated Drum Tower Hospital of Nanjing University Medical School, Nanjing, China
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Advanced Science, March 2022