Scientists grow tiny hearts in Queensland laboratory, progressing cardiovascular research

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Queensland scientists have helped develop tiny hearts, grown in a laboratory, offering a new way to test treatments for people with heart disease. Professor James Hudson is from QIMR Berghofer and is the lead researcher of the study.

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00:00They're a miniature version of a human heart muscle strip and what they do is enable us

00:08to model how that heart contracts and how we can change that contraction and how it

00:13changes with disease.

00:14So how did you manage to make them in the lab?

00:19We've spent about 10 years making them.

00:20We make them from stem cells.

00:22We coax them into heart cells the same way that the body develops heart cells and in

00:26this paper we've discovered a new way to really accelerate their maturation.

00:31How big are they?

00:33They're around a millimetre across.

00:36They contract with a similar force to heart muscle tissue and they're comprised of about

00:4050,000 cells each.

00:42So why are they so useful in testing treatments and extending knowledge about heart disease?

00:49Well what we can do is we can model heart disease in a dish whether that's genetic or imposing

00:55environmental conditions and because we can make a thousand of these a week in our lab

01:00it enables us to really rapidly screen for new therapeutics.

01:03James are there different types of heart disease are there?

01:09There are many different types different genetic mutations in your cardiomyocyte proteins can

01:16cause different types of heart failure which can manifest in children or also in adults and

01:23then other types can be caused by more environmental conditions such as obesity diabetes and these

01:28sorts of comorbidities.

01:30And are these tiny hearts as good as testing the treatments on human full-sized hearts?

01:39They're not a full recapitulation but we're getting pretty close and this gives us confidence that

01:45when we get a really exciting hit like we did in this paper that when we run that through the testing that

01:51it's going to progress a lot quicker. At the moment only one out of 10 drugs actually succeeds in the clinic and we hope to improve that.

01:59How long did it take to develop these tiny hearts?

02:03Well the original platform took us about 10 years and then it was another five years of work to really

02:09get these advanced maturation conditions so they're a closer representation of the human heart.

02:15How much progress then is being made in understanding and treating heart disease and how much will

02:20having these these tiny hearts accelerate that progress?

02:24Yeah unlike cancer cardiovascular disease especially once you have heart failure doesn't really have

02:32that many treatment options and so our goal is to discover the processes that are altered in that heart

02:38muscle so that we can actually start to come up with new therapeutics for patients and that's a key goal of our research

02:44research program. Technologies like this now make that possible to do it on a much larger scale than previously done before.

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