Bleeding Edge

During a heart attack, oxygen can't reach an area of heart tissue, and the cells there die. The long-term health of survivors depends on the border zone between injured low-oxygen cells and healthy high-oxygen ones. After a heart attack, this region goes through changes that can stop the heart from pumping blood around the body properly. But scientists haven't been able to study the border zone in detail – until now. Here, we see rat heart cells on a chip, aligned so that they can contract like a real beating heart. To mimic the border zone after a heart attack, scientists control oxygen levels in a gradient across the chip. This technology captures the damage seen in real life, including inflammation, weak contractions, and disrupted calcium signalling. Using this chip, researchers hope to understand how an oxygen gradient leads to heart failure and discover new treatments to prevent it.

Written by Henry Stennett

Henry Stennett

Writer

Henry is a science communicator at Cancer Research UK and a freelance writer. He used to research microbiology but now he’s got the writing bug.

• Image from work by Megan L. Rexius-Hall and colleagues
• Laboratory for Living Systems Engineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
• Published in Science Advances, December 2022