Under a $10 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health, University of Washington researchers are leading an effort to grow functional human heart tissue that, they hope, could lead to the development of tissue-engineered replacement hearts and the growth of other major organs in a laboratory setting.
The researchers will first focus on culturing patches of cardiac muscle that could be grafted onto damaged hearts to improve their efficiency; they then plan to engineer a ventricular tube, a cylinder of rolled cardiac muscle with valves that could assist a weakened heart with pumping; and they next plan to try to develop a full ventricle. To grow such devices as the ventricle and, eventually, a heart, the researchers plan to use a porous scaffold seeded with heart cells. The scaffolding is placed in a bioreactor that provides a steady temperature and nutrients that are necessary for the cells to grow and reproduce.
The effort will be undertaken by 44 scientists representing the University of Washington, the Hope Heart Institute in Seattle; Advanced Polymer Systems of Redwood City, California; the University of Toronto in Canada; and Advanced Tissue Sciences of La Jolla, California, which has patented technology that will be used in the project. The research is scheduled to take place over ten years, and the investigators plan to apply for renewed funding at the end of the $10 million, five-year grant.
"This is a sort of mini-Apollo mission," said principal investigator Buddy Ratner, director of the University of Washington's engineered biomaterials program. "Their goal was to talk on the moon in ten years. We also have an exciting, almost audacious goal-to grow a human heart ventricle."
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