Heart Making

Thousands of people wait for heart transplants every year. Bioengineering heart tissue could change that. Researchers look at creating viable heart tissue using human donor hearts considered unsuitable for transplant. First, donor cells must be removed – decellularisation – while preserving the extracelullar matrix (ECM) they sit in, so host cells can be added to repopulate the tissue. The team tested four methods of removing cells, and tissues were imaged before (top) and after (bottom, showing one method) using scanning electron microscopy. Once decellularised, human induced pluripotent-derived cardiomyocytes (hIPCMs) were added and successfully populated the tissues. Some decellularisation methods better preserved the ECM but at the expense of not removing all the donor cells. What’s more, the different methods weren’t equally effective across all donor tissues. The method used, therefore, needs to be tailored to the specific donor tissue and its intended function, highlighting the need for personalised medicine when engineering heart tissue.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image from work by Miguel F. Tenreiro and colleagues
• iBET, Instituto de Biologia Experimental e Tecnológica, Oeiras, Portugal
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Scientific Reports, October 2021