New technique to stimulate heart muscle by light may lead to light-controlled pacemakers
By employing optogenetics, a new field that uses genetically altered cells to respond to light, and a tandem unit cell (TCU) strategy, researchers at Stony Brook University have demonstrated a way to control cell excitation and contraction in cardiac muscle cells, the details of which are published in the early online edition of Circulation: Arrhythmia & Electrophysiology: Stimulating Cardiac Muscle by Light: Cardiac Optogenetics by Cell Delivery. The team of scientists, led by Emilia Entcheva, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering, Physiology & Biophysics, and the Division of Cardiology in Medicine, Stony Brook University, includes members of the inter-departmental Institute of Molecular Cardiology at Stony Brook. The authors claim that their technique may help form the basis for a new generation of light-driven cardiac pacemakers and other medical devices.