Scientists Have Grown A Piece Of Heart Muscle From A Mouse Embryo
A team of Harvard Stem Cell Institute scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital and collaborators at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has taken a giant step toward the possibility of using human stem cells to repair damaged hearts.
Scientists have grown a piece of heart muscle from Embryonic Stem Cells by using stem cells from a mouse embryo, a big step toward one day repairing damage from heart attacks.
Director of the Cardiovascular Research Center, the Professor of Basic Science at Harvard Medical School, Chien said “This is the beginning of making heart parts for heart disease.”
Chien called the new findings “the latest in a chain of scientific discoveries that have come out of our lab here at Mass General and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute that have been a collaboration of physicians, scientists and bioengineers. For the first time we report the identification of a cell that could be viewed as perhaps an optimal cell type to promote cardiac muscle regeneration because the cells that we use come from embryonic stem cells and then have been induced to form an intact strip of functioning ventricular muscle.” Chien said the work takes the most basic form of undifferentiated stem cell and directs its differentiation and development “to ventricular muscle – and that’s the type of muscle in the heart we’re trying to regenerate.”
To test whether what they had created were in fact cardiomyocytes, the researchers ran a variety of tests. They analyzed the electrical and chemical activities of the cells, examined their structure with an electron microscope, investigated their responses to hormones such as adrenaline, and probed the genes and proteins within the cells. Comparing the results to known cardiomyocytes suggested that they had successfully cultured the cells.
Parker, whose lab developed the technology that produces a strip of muscle from the cardiac cells, said that “We try to develop technologies that are cell-agnostic; technologies that can work with Ken’s cardiac progenitors, or anyone else’s stem cells. These techniques are not limited to cardiac cells, or even to stem cells for that matter.”
Doctors today have lots of treatments to prevent a heart attack. But once one strikes, there’s no way to restore the heart muscle it kills. Gradually the weakened heart quits pumping properly, leading to deadly heart failure.
“We’re not saying this is going to happen tomorrow,” said Chien, who also is working on repeating the work with human cells. “I believe within five years,” it might be ready to try with people.