Heart Cells

It’s no small feat to test drugs on living human heart tissue ex vivo. But that’s what bioengineers at the University of California at Berkeley have done in growing pluripotent stem cells, converting them to cardiomyocytes, and keeping them alive in a microfluidics device for drug testing. As this piece reports: “Once adult induced pluripotent stem cells are transformed into cardiac cells, they start beating on their own at the normal rate of 55 to 80 beats per minute. Then to test whether the system worked, the researchers exposed the cells, which had been loaded into the chip, to four well-understood pharmaceuticals that either raise or lower heart rate. All caused the cells to behave as they would be expected to if they belonged to an actual patient.”   MORE

Image Credit: University of California at Berkeley