Israeli Innovation Brings Personalized Cardiac Treatment a Heartbeat Away

The technology is paving the way to revolutionary treatments and implants for damaged areas of the heart.

By United with Israel Staff

Researchers succeeded in producing 3D engineered cardiac tissues from chamber-specific heart cells derived from human stem cells. This medical development opens the door for creating personalized medications for cardiac patients and advances in new cardiac drug developments. The breakthrough was published recently in Nature Communications.

This research model simulates the most common irregular heartbeat (arrhythmia), called atrial fibrillation. It opens the door for testing the success of various drugs on individual patients to prevent or stop arrhythmia.

Because they were able to separate atrial and ventricular tissue models, researchers can discover which drugs improve atrial cell function without damaging ventricular cell function.

“Separation between these two types of tissues is important because drugs that can improve the function of atrial cells and thus prevent arrhythmias in the auricle are liable to cause harm to ventricular cell function and even induce ventricular arrhythmias,” said Professor Lior Gepstein of the Technion Institute and Rambam Health Care Medical Center in Israel.

“For example, for atrial fibrillation – the most common type of irregular heartbeat that is also responsible for more than a quarter of all strokes – we want to influence the electrical activity of the atrial cells using drugs, without affecting the function of the ventricular tissue. Now that we can individually manufacture the cells of the atrium and the ventricle, we can test each drug for each cell type separately,” Gepstein added.

Gepstein hopes “we will be able to use similar methods to also produce heart tissue for transplants in cardiac patients. These tissues will be well received because they are based on the genetic characteristics of the patient him/herself.”

As organ transplants from outside sources often face rejection, this model, produced by the cells and tissues of the patient, would bypass that challenge. This advanced process works by collecting adult skin or blood cells from the patient, reprogramming them in a sort of “cellular time tunnel” that returns them to the state of the earliest cells in the body, resembling embryonic stem cells.

Gepstein’s model is able to “test different treatments in the lab and choose in advance the optimal treatment for the specific patient.”

“This work also demonstrated the possibility of using genetic editing (CRISPR) to correct the mutation leading to arrhythmia in this disease, providing proof-of-concept evidence for the potential of this approach for treating genetic disorders in the future,” Gepstein said.