Creating Lifelike Cardiac Tissue.

• Position: Brief Article

With a grant from the National Institutes of Health, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Loyola University Medical Center, Chicago, are growing lifelike cardiac tissue for possible use in the scaffolding and repair of damaged heart cells. The work is expected to have wide application in studying and eventually treating heart disease, the number-one cause of death in the U.S. Heart disease causes more than 41% of all deaths in America, with an average of 950,000 annually.

The model heart tissue, a prototype of which has already been developed at UIC, will enable researchers to examine the chemical and physiological causes of heart failure. It may also one day be used in tissue engineering, to replace sections of damaged organs. "Unlike a mechanical heart, cellular repairs would last forever," indicates Brenda Russell, professor of physiology and biophysics at the UIC College of Medicine.

Efforts began three years ago to create heart tissue in the laboratory that would act in many ways like a living heart. "The heart is a difficult organ to study. If you surgically intervene in a living animal with a defective heart, most of the other critical systems, like the lungs and kidneys, shut down. The animal dies. We needed a way to study the heart without the animal attached so that we could start and stop the heart to analyze conditions present when it failed."

Creating lifelike heart tissue from cardiac cells was technologically challenging. "Isolating cells from a heart and growing them in a standard laboratory petri dish is like taking an egg and cracking it into a frying pan," Russell explains. "The yolk, or nucleus, sits on top and the white [the cardiac muscle protein] spreads out on the bottom of the pan. In other words, it's no longer a rope-like contracting fiber because it has nothing to attach to. As a result, it no...