Visible Light Could Keep Hearts Of The Future Ticking
Nick Gilbert
at 12:00 AM 21 Sep 2020
Comments 0
Light sensitive heart cells might just hold the key to keeping your blood pumping
IMAGE BY Ton Haex, Flickr
Health // 

The heart is a delicate instrument, relying on finely timed signals so it can pump blood in just the right fashion to keep you alive. When this process fails, artificial pacemakers, incorporating electrodes and microelectronics, have to step into the breach. As it turns out, scientists might just have arrived at a possible new alternative, and it's as simple as turning on a light.

Researchers at Stanford University, California have engineered a new kind of heart cell that contracts in the presence of a light source.

This responsiveness is due to a little protein called channelrhodopsin-2 (or ChR2 for short), that is itself sensitive to a particular wavelength of blue light. In Stanford's recent experiment, this protein was added by encoding the required DNA pattern into human embryonic stem cells.

While the development is useful in the near future mostly to allow more in depth study of the mechanics of the heart, it could potentially lead to a new wave of pacemakers without the problems presented by surgically implanting electronic devices into the human heart.

Such light-sensitive cells also would mean that mechanical faults, an ever-present problem with traditional pacemakers, would be a thing of the past.

“We might, for instance, create a pacemaker that isn’t in physical contact with the heart,” said report co-author Christopher Zarins, MD.

“Instead of surgically implanting a device that has electrodes poking into the heart, we would inject these engineered light-sensitive cells into the faulty heart and pace them remotely with light, possibly even from outside of the heart.”

Cells would also eventually be engineered using the host's own stem cells, which would mean a zero chance of rejection, thereby eliminating the need for anti-rejection drugs and constant hospital check-ups.

The new cells are described in a paper, 'Multiscale Computational Models for Optogenetic Control of Cardiac Function',  published in the latest edition of the Biophysical Journal.


[Stanford University Media]

 
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