Lab-grown heart cells advance future research
28 Feb 2014
New methods for growing heart cells could significantly reduce the need to use animals in drug testing, according to research conducted at Imperial College London (ICL).
When drugs are tested on animal subjects, side effects that might occur in humans are not always evident in an animal study.
Now, however, scientists at ICL’s National Heart and Lung Institute are developing methods that would make it possible to grow large amounts of human heart tissue in the lab that can be used for the purposes of drug testing.
Currently, researchers are able to grow small amounts of heart muscle from human cells, but these cells do not develop all of the features of heart cells in the body if grown in a petri dish.
“These cells tend to be round and tend to be rather slow in their activity, simply because they’re not challenged by their environment,” said ICL scientist Cesare Terracciano.
“The heart is a very dynamic organ which beats continuously and is subjected to very high pressures, and these are not present in culture.”
Working in collaboration with the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and the University of Southampton, Terracciano and his colleagues have developed new surfaces that encourage cells to grow into regular lines as they do in the heart.
According to the team’s studies, cells grown using their methods behave more like cells in the heart.
“If we’re successful in developing a platform that can be widely used for drug testing, we will be able to reduce dramatically the number of animals used for research and avoid harmful effects that new drugs might have on patients,” said Terracciano.
