Researchers in the US are exploring on how heart cells stored on a silicon chip can assist with screening drugs for human use.
The silicon chip is basically a stack of pulsating cardiac muscle cells, sited on a silicon device which glues everything in place while replicating a human heart tissue. The next phase includes providing medication to the cells, where researchers can better ascertain the way human hearts responds to drugs.
Currently this is being tested on animals and given the variation between humans and animals; it is anything but fool proof.
Kevin Healy, the researcher leading the team at University of California stated “Many cardiovascular drugs target those channels, so these differences often result in inefficient and costly experiments that do not provide accurate answers about the toxicity of a drug in humans. Ultimately, these chips could replace the use of animals to screen drugs for safety and efficacy.”
The cost of the development this drug for the use of humans is about $ 5 billion with 2/3rd of that money being invested in the R&D sector.
The bioengineering of something like this has the ability to decrease costs considerably all while accelerating the procedure.
The assembly of the chip is insanely clever with the researchers making certain that its 3D make-up is similar to the geometry of the heart’s connective tissue fibers.
UC Berkeley’s Sarah Yang said “They added the differentiated human heart cells into the loading area, a process that Healy likened to passengers boarding a subway train at rush hour. The system’s confined geometry helps align the cells in multiple layers and in a single direction.”
The cells deriving from the stem cells can become different types of tissues and started beating in less than 24 hours.
Lead author of the study, Anurag Mathur said “This system is not a simple cell culture where tissue is being bathed in a static bath of liquid. We designed this system so that it is dynamic; it replicates how tissue in our bodies actually gets exposed to nutrients and drugs.”
The researchers are claiming that this chip has the possibility to be adapted to model human genetic diseases or to monitor people’s response to drugs. They are also hoping to diversify it to multi-organ investigations, where a plate has the probability of featuring hundreds of micro-physical cell culture systems.
Healy further adds, “Linking heart and liver tissue would allow us to determine whether a drug that initially works fine in the heart might later be metabolized by the liver in a way that would be toxic. The engineered heart tissue remained viable and functional over multiple weeks. Given that time, it could be used to test various drugs.”