‘Heart disease-on-a-chip’
Harvard scientists have merged stem cell and “organ-on-a-chip” technologies to grow, for the first time, functioning human heart tissue carrying an inherited cardiovascular disease. The research appears to be a big step forward for personalized medicine, because it is working proof that a chunk of tissue containing a patient’s specific genetic disorder can be replicated in the laboratory. The work, published in the journal Nature Medicine, is the result of a collaborative effort bringing together scientists from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI), the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Boston Children’s Hospital, the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and Harvard Medical School (HMS). It combines the “organs-on-chips” expertise of Kevin Kit Parker and stem cell and clinical insights by William Pu. Using their interdisciplinary approach, the investigators modeled the cardiovascular disease Barth syndrome, a rare X-linked cardiac disorder caused by mutation of a single gene called Tafazzin, or...