American Scientists Have Developed A Chip That Imitates The Human Heart
Scientists at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles have developed a chip that has the properties of the human heart. It can be used in the treatment of various diseases.
It is noted that this chip will play an important role in the treatment of cancer – this technology will help study the heart in more detail and check its condition during illness.
New and untested medications and treatment methods can cause much more harm to health than good. This is especially true for the treatment of cancer, which destroys not only diseased cells, but also many healthy ones. It was to evaluate the toxicity of such drugs for cardiac tissue that scientists from the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles created a “heart on a chip” that, like a living one, beats at a frequency of 60 beats per minute. “Ultimately, multiclinical hiPSC-based systems, such as the ‘heart chip’ presented here, may reduce the reliance on animal testing traditionally used for preclinical testing of drug cardiotoxicity,” the researchers write in a paper in The Royal Society of Chemistry.
Another important characteristic of the heart chip is the two parallel channels, which allow the heart cells and blood vessels to separate as they do in the human body, but at the same time they are close enough to communicate with each other.
By modeling blood flow and mechanical movements of the heart in response to certain drugs, scientists can predict potential toxicity problems that could cause arrhythmias or muscle cell death.
