Researchers develop mini-heart on microchip

Researchers with the University of California at Berkeley have grown a viable, pulsating heart on a microchip to improve drug screening.

It is the latest human organ, after a lung, a liver and a piece of intestine, replicated under laboratory environment. With the help of this tissue created from stem cells, researchers can predict if a certain medicine will have an adverse effect or how much dosage a patient needs.

This method, if works, will replace animal models that do not mimic human responses, according to the researchers.

"Many times doctors and researchers fail to predict a response to a certain drug or medicine because of the inaccuracy of the models used, like mice, that don't have the same reactions as human tissue," Dr. Anurag Mathur, lead author of the study and post doctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, told Xinhua.

The research, which was published by the latest journal Scientific Reports, was carried out at the laboratory of bioengineering professor Kevin Healy, Xinhua reports. 

The tiny heart, which, according to Mathur, is hardly the width of a human hair, was created with human-induced pluripotent stem cells that can form many different types of tissues. These cells, once tricked into forming heart tissue, were grown around a special silicon microchip with cell and media channels that mimicked the heart's blood vessels. Feeding this bionic heart a mix of nutrients to keep it alive, researchers then could make the heart beat and work for up to a month.

"We were able to run multiple tests during this period, so we proved that this can be a viable solution to replace animal models, " Mathur said. "It began beating only 24 hours after being developed at a normal rate of 50 to 80 beats per minute."

Drug screening using this device could not only save lives, but also millions of dollars due to the high cost of calculating the approximate dose needed for patients with heart conditions.

"It takes about 5 billion U.S. dollars on average to develop a drug, and 60 percent of that figure comes from upfront costs in the research and development phase," Healy said in a press release. "Using a well-designed model of a human organ could significantly cut the cost and time of bringing a new drug to market."

Researchers see the future of medicine as completely personalized thanks to this kind of organs-on-a-chip. All it takes will be a sample, the patient then will be able to have his or her heart modeled in a lab with all the tests done.

"Doctors will be able to predict how certain drugs react on specific patients, thus preventing many illnesses and loss of valuable time," Mathur said, adding that "I see this happening in five years in most of the doctor's offices."