They create a system that predicts the functionality of laboratory heart tissue

Scientists have developed a system that for the first time is able to predict the behavior of heart tissue grown in a laboratory. This is a novel in silico tool, i.e. a design that allows the development and functionality of biofabricated cardiac tissue to be modeled, simulated and visualized by computer. This is a significant advance in the creation of computational models that allow the creation of the human myocardium in the laboratory to be accelerated.

This achievement is the result of a collaboration between three Biomedical Network Research Centers in Spain: Cardiovascular Disease (CIBERCV), Cancer (CIBERONC) and Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine (CIBERBBN). On the Spanish side, the Center for Applied Medical Research (CIMA) of the University of Navarra (UNAV), the University Clinic of Navarra, the University Institute of Research in Engineering of Aragon and the General University Hospital Gregorio Maranone have also collaborated. It is also supported by the University of Western Australia and University College London in the United Kingdom.

Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide, and myocardial-related complications are among the leading causes of drug withdrawal, both therapeutically and in the drug development process.

Regenerative medicine seeks to address this problem by advancing the creation of human heart tissue to better understand how the heart is damaged and to be able to develop more precise drugs and new therapies to treat it.

The work has been coordinated by CIMA of the University of Navarra. Manuel Mazzo, Olala Iglesias, María Flandes Iparaguiere and María del Pilar Monteiro Calle in the image. (Photo: CYBER / CIMA / UNAV)

“Assessing all the variables that influence the development of each manufactured fabric requires a great deal of time and resources. Thus, in this work we aim to make a prediction based on biological and mechanistic information to accelerate this process.” The device had to be designed”, explains Manuel Mazzo, researcher at the CIMA Regenerative Medicine Program and principal investigator of the work.

To design this novel device, the researchers generated human cardiac mini-tissues with different functional characteristics to feed this information into computer simulations. “By feeding the collected biological information into innovative computational simulations, our work paves the way to advance the development of in silico tools to predict the development of biofabricated cardiac tissue after generation, paving the way for more precise and precise tissue fabrication.” charts. Biomimetics”, concludes Mazzo.

Mazzo and his colleagues present technical details of their new system in the academic journal Biofabrication, under the title “Construction of the Human Myocardium Using Multidimensional Modeling of Engineered Tissues”. (Source: Cyber)