Replacement Pump

If a zebrafish’s heart gets damaged, there’s a good chance the cells will fully regenerate, just as those pictured have done. Unfortunately, the same isn’t true for humans and, if a person survives a heart attack, they are stuck with a suboptimal pump for the remainder of their lives. Because a damaged human heart can ultimately weaken and fail, scientists are investigating cell replacement therapies to restore muscle function. One problem is, lab-grown heart cells don’t fully mature and so fail to work within the existing muscle. Recently, scientists have discovered the machinery in regenerating zebrafish heart cells necessary for their maturation, integration and function. When the equivalent machinery was switched on in lab-grown human and mouse heart cells, they showed similar signs of maturity. The next step, then, is to see whether this maturation machinery can promote the cells’ functional integration the way it does in the fish.

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 Phong D. Nguyen and colleagues
• Hubrecht Institute-KNAW and University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Science, May 2023