New and unproven medications and treatments may do more harm than good. This is especially true for cancer treatment, which destroys not only diseased cells but also many healthy cells.

To fully evaluate the toxicity of such drugs on heart tissue, scientists from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles created a “heart on a chip” that beats at a rate of 60 beats per minute while alive.

Consequently, multiclinical hiPSC-based systems, such as the “heart chip” presented here, can reduce the dependence on animal experiments traditionally used for preclinical drug cardiotoxicity testing.
– noted the researchers.

How did you achieve this?

Induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) It can transform into any type of cell. From these, scientists created two parallel channels; Thus, a channel resembling muscle tissue was formed in one and a channel resembling blood vessels in the other. The muscle tissue remained viable for weeks and exhibited contractions typical of heart tissue at a rate of approximately 60 beats per minute.

The researchers stated that the “cardiac chip” platform they developed allows the screening of potential cardiotoxic chemotherapy drugs on different cardiovascular cell types in a physiologically relevant model.

Living tissue remained functional for several weeks, allowing long-term investigation of the effects of drugs and other environmental factors on the heart. Such a platform would not only help develop safer drugs, but could also give scientists more insight into the intricacies of heart disease—how it begins and progresses, and how it might be treated.