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TISSUE ENGINEERING

A scale model of the human ventricle

Nature Biomedical Engineering volume 2, pages 888–889 (2018)Cite this article

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A tissue-engineered scale model of the human ventricle made of nanofibrous scaffolds and human-stem-cell-derived cardiomyocytes enables the modelling of arrhythmia.

Parker and co-authors applied a gelatine coating to the otherwise biologically inert PCL so as to provide RGD motifs (that is, motifs of the tripeptide Arg-Gly-Asp) for enhanced cell attachment. The engineered heart chambers, 500 μl in volume, were approximately twice the size of a rat heart ventricle and 1/250 the size of a human heart ventricle. Pull-spinning created the topography for improved anisotropic heart-muscle alignment after seeding with cardiomyocytes. Heart bioreactors incorporating pressure–volume catheters allowed the recording of classical haemodynamic parameters in the engineered heart chambers, the imaging of chamber-wall motion by ultrasound, and the optical imaging of calcium activity for analyses of the spread of electrical excitations. The pressure–volume catheter recordings identified peak pressures of 50 μmHg in rat and human chambers, which resulted in 5-μl and 1-μl volume changes during the contraction cycle (representing an ejection fraction of 1% and 0.2%) in, respectively, the rat and human models (for comparison, the human heart has an ejection fraction of 60%). By introducing structural damage, the propagation of calcium wavefronts could be disturbed, leading to the so-called spiral-wave electrical phenomena, which underlie cardiac arrhythmia4.

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Fig. 1: Cell-centric and material-centric heart-muscle engineering.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology, University Medical Center Göttingen and the DZHK (German Center for Cardiovascular Research) partner-site Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

    Wolfram-Hubertus Zimmermann

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  1. Wolfram-Hubertus Zimmermann
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Correspondence to Wolfram-Hubertus Zimmermann.

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Competing interests

W.-H.Z. is founder and advisor of Repairon GmbH and myriamed GmbH, which work on the development of engineered heart muscle for heart repair and on the application of engineered tissue for phenotypic drug screens.

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Zimmermann, WH. A scale model of the human ventricle. Nat Biomed Eng 2, 888–889 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-018-0332-9

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