Using ultrasound to make lab-grown heart cells more like the real thing

Acoustic patterning for next-generation drug screening & cardiac engineering (Ms Ekaterina (Katya)Pchenlintseva) 

Scientific advances mean that it is now possible to grow heart cells in the laboratory from stem cells. There are several potential uses for lab-grown cells. For instance, to create ‘prosthetic’ heart tissue to repair the damage caused by a heart attack, or to test new medicines in the laboratory before advancing to clinical trials. However, there is a practical problem that is hampering progress. When grown in the lab, it is hard to make the cells organise themselves into lines – like in real heart muscle – which stops the lab-grown heart muscle from beating properly. Cells also tend to form into different sized groups, which can lead to inaccurate conclusions when testing medicines. This team have shown they can control the arrangement of lab-grown cells using ultrasound. Ultrasound waves can be used to make areas of high and low pressure, which can very quickly move heart cells into uniform groups or orderly lines. Their goal now is to show that ultrasound is safe and effective for this use. They want to show that it produces a more accurate model for testing medicines, and that ultrasound can help to engineer heart muscle that beats more like real heart muscle. This could help to unlock the potential of lab-grown heart tissue to speed up drug discovery and repair damaged hearts.