“Heart on a chip” will be the subjects for testing medicines

The development of new drugs is not without tests. At first, scientists offer their pet, but the end user of the medicine — man. But here there is no guarantee that the proposed cure is harmless to the subject. Professionals it is important to know what are the possible side effects from taking developed medication that has to change. The solution was found. National laboratory Lawrence Livermore (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) recently introduced the “heart on a chip”.

Experts have learned to generate a tissue that performs the main functions of the main human body — the heart, by artificial means. No one has achieved such success. Heart tissue grown in the lab of Lawrence, enables measurements of the intensity of her contractions and passing it into electrical signals. The samples that were created earlier, could not perform more than one function of the heart.

Tissue was grown from cells of human heart in the laboratory for 9 days. The first results of the researchers received 2 days after the start of the experiment. Two-dimensional structure that could be reduced, received from the cardiomyocytes, heart muscle cells. Further, the specialists studied how the heart is functioning on norepinephrine, it is used in the treatment of heart failure and reduced blood pressure. Scientists have documented that the drug heart often decreased and was more frequent electric signals. Under the action of norepinephrine, a similar reaction is observed in the cardiac muscle.

Continued experimentation has allowed to achieve a stunning effect — the conservation of electric pulses to the tissues, when the contraction ended. Earlier, for a similar effect on any artificial trainer to achieve was not possible. Thus, in the future the new platform is likely to partly abandon animal testing.

Source: phys.org