Rhythm is Crucial Even in Forming Hearts

A developing heart needs rhythm even before it starts pumping blood, according researchers looking into how to recreate heart valves in the lab.

When a baby's heart is first forming in his or her mother's womb, the pulsation of heart cells as they group and form tissue is key to a proper development of the organ, according to a new study published in Biomaterials.

The study's research team first determined this when trying to find out how to synthetically create a human heart valve in a lab. According to the researchers, the human heart valve has always been a difficult part of the heart to replicate. Even today, with modern artificial hearts, the valve is one of the main road-bumps that is a source of frustration for biomedical engineers.

This research team decided that to succeed, they first needed to take a step back and determine just how the human hearts, and particularly its troublesome valves, are made naturally.

What they discovered was something very interesting. In a newly forming heart, the beating of cardiac muscle cells appeared to almost serve as a kind of guide for the cardiac cells that were forming the valves, essentially crafting the valves to the specific pulsations of that human heart.

To reinforce their theory, the research team took several chicken hearts in mid-formation and interrupted their cellular pulsations, creating a new and irregular beat. This resulted in nearly all interrupted hearts forming defective valves, indicating that the team was right on the money with their hypothesis.

The researchers write that now knowing what helps form the valves naturally; they can hopefully apply the same pulsations synthetically in a lab. The plan is to start working with stem cell researchers to produce functional human heart valves that can repair the valves of hearts damage or diseased.

The study was published for the March issue of Biomaterials.