Israeli scientists grow tiny beating heart model from stem cells

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – A team of Israeli scientists announced on August 7 that they have succeeded in creating a tiny beating heart model grown from stem cells in a lab, the Times of Israel (TOI) reports. Researchers believe that the availability of human organoids such as this model heart can help scientists understand human physiology and lead to medical breakthroughs in fighting disease.

The ground-breaking heart study by researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and Tissue Dynamics Ltd has been published in the peer-reviewed Nature Biomedical Engineering journal.

The size of a third of a grain of rice, the new heart differs from previously developed models because it has key structures including ventricles, atria, an epicardium, endocardium, and natural pacemakers: previous models were only made up of heart muscle cells, TOI reports.

“What makes this even more groundbreaking is that because we could make this heart in the lab, we were able to put sensors on it that told us how it works and to get some insight into the physiology of the human heart,” Prof. Yaakov Nahmias, who led the research, told The Times of Israel.

“If you want to study the heart, you have a huge problem if you’re using animals. A lot of things like the channels in the mice hearts are very different from humans and a lot of the drugs and a lot of the diseases simply don’t translate,” Nahmias said.

Latest Worthy News