Wissenschaftler haben ein dreidimensionales „Heart-on-a-Chip“ (HOC) entwickelt, das einen Durchbruch im Kampf gegen die weltweit häufigste Todesursache, Herz-Kreislauf-Erkrankungen, bedeuten könnte.

>One major challenge is that we cannot easily test how a human heart will react to a drug or disease without putting someone at risk. This engineered heart tissue beats on its own, it mobilizes calcium to initiate muscular activity, and it responds predictably to common drugs.

>It’s the first to incorporate a dual-sensing platform that provides real-time tracking of activity throughout the heart tissue down to the cellular level.

>In a [recent](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smll.202504493) paper, scientists from multiple Canadian institutions describe how they achieved this „significant advance in cardiac tissue engineering and pharmacological testing.“

>The key advance here is the integration of sensors that can detect both macro-scale and micro-scale cardiac activity. Both current HOC platforms and the research team’s previous iteration, described in a 2024 paper, lack high-resolution cellular-level sensing.

>Small-scale sensing is vital because many cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are associated with dysfunction in cardiomyocytes, the individual contractile cells that form heart muscle tissue, or myocardium. As a result, measuring cellular function is critical for preventing heart failure in patients with CVDs.

>To build their HOCs, the researchers harvested cardiac muscle cells and cardiac connective tissue cells from rats. They inserted these cells into a gel-like matrix rich in fibrous proteins and nutrients to stimulate growth, and then seeded them on tiny, flexible silicon-based chips.