Abdeali Saherwala | Staff Writer
Featured image: A 3D beating heart has been created at York’s chemistry labs and will be used in heart disease research. | Azeb Yusuf
Heart disease is reportedly the second-leading cause of death in Canada, but hopefully not for much longer.
A York chemistry professor and a team of graduate students have devised a way to create 3D heart tissue that beats in harmony.
Muhammad Yousaf and his team have created scaffold-free beating tissue out of contractile cardiac muscle cells, connective tissue cells and vascular cells, which is believed to be a worldfirst.
Yousaf hopes that in managing to join three different types of cardiac cells together, scientists will be able to greater understand and study heart diseases and issues with transplantations.
“This breakthrough will allow better and earlier drug testing, and [will] potentially eliminate harmful or toxic medications sooner,” he said.
Prior to the discovery, most 2D or 3D in vitro tissue needed scaffolding to attach cells together, which imposed severe limitations on research.
Dmitry Rogozhnikov, a PhD candidate in chemistry, stated that creating functional cardiac tissue that beats in synchrony has proved an incredibly difficult process.
“For 2D or 3D cardiac tissue to be functional it needs the same high-cellular density and the cells must be in contact to facilitate synchronized beating,” said Rogozhnikov.
“Making in vitro 3D cardiac tissue has long presented a challenge to scientists because of the high density of cells and muscularity of the heart,” he added.
Yousaf also noted that although the 3D cardiac tissue is currently created on a millimetre scale, there is the potential to replicate the process on a larger scale.
The glue used to stick the three different types of cardiac cells, ViaGlue, will also provide researchers with the technology to create and test 3D in vitro tissue in their own labs.
Yousaf has established a start-up company, OrganoLinX, which will begin to commercialize the ViaGlue reagent and provide custom 3D tissues on demand for researchers and patients in need.
According to Statistics Canada, approximately 2.4 million Canadians over the age of 20 suffer from heart disease.
