Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (news - web sites) have used rat cells to grow dime-sized swatches of heart tissue that twitch like a beating heart when an electrical current passes through. The researchers are now trying to patch ailing rodent hearts with the tissue in hopes that it works like a kind of cardiac bandage. If successful, it raises the possibility that human hearts could one day be repaired with tissue grown in the laboratory. The Boston Globe reported that the MIT findings mark the first time that scientists have successfully used an electrical current to produce dense heart tissue that beats in a rhythm mimicking a live animal’s heart. Heart cells must be densely packed to communicate with each other. The electrical signal functions like an orchestra conductor, telling those cells how to align and work together. Heart specialists and scientists from the expanding field of tissue engineering described the MIT research as a significant advance. But they noted it’s a long way from research in rodents to successful treatment in humans. “We’d all like to be able to grow a patch and put it onto the patient and reanimate what has become dysfunctional tissue in the heart,” said William Wagner, a University of Pittsburgh researcher who is also working to develop a cardiac patch. “That’s the dream. This research from MIT looks like it’s an important advance in our ability to get something that functionally approaches cardiac tissue.” The MIT team’s findings appeared Monday in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
