London scientists have created a new “heart” in a lab using stem cells in a breakthrough that could lead to treatments for cardiovascular heart disease.
Researchers at the University of East London used technology to grow stem cells in a dish and separate them into heart tissue, so they can function like a miniature human heart.
The team hope to use the stem cell hearts to develop a greater understanding of cardiovascular heart disease and enable them to better target effective treatments.
There are around 7.6 million people living with heart and circulatory diseases in the UK, according to the British Heart Foundation. Around 49,000 people under the age of 75 die from cardiovascular disease each year.
The “heart in a dish” has many of the characteristics of the normal human organ, providing researchers with an opportunity to study heart disease without the need for animal experiments.
Researchers at UEL hope to use the research to develop an AI that could help to predict heart disease at an earlier stage. The AI will be trained to recognise the way that the heart beats in detail and detect changes in the shape of cells.
Lead researcher Dr Prashant Ruchaya, a senior lecturer in physiology at UEL’s School of Health, said: “Intricate changes in the contractions of a heart when they contract and relax are very hard to detect with the human eye, and the use of AI will mean the intricate changes will be able to be detected through the changes in the shape of the cells as they beat.
“These changes can be used as a prognostic marker for aging - either healthy ageing, or potentially detrimentally aging, and therefore having a diseased heart model could revolutionise treatments and be a game changer in the field of diagnostics.”
