(ETH) – Researchers at Michigan State University have just created a miniature human heart model in the laboratory for the first time. The heart is complete with all primary heart cell types and a functioning structure of chambers and vascular tissue.
Heart disease is the number one leading cause of death in the United States. “These mini hearts constitute incredibly powerful models in which to study all kinds of cardiac disorders with a degree of precision unseen before,” said Aitor Aguirre, the study’s senior author and assistant professor of biomedical engineering at MSU’s Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering.
According to the new report from Medical Express, The human heart organoids, or hHOs for short, were created by way of a novel stem cell framework that mimics the embryonic and fetal developmental environments. “Organoids—meaning ‘resembling an organ’—are self-assembling 3-D cell constructs that recapitulate organ properties and structure to a significant extent,” said Yonatan Israeli, a graduate student in the Aguirre Lab and first author of the study.
