Replicating a human heart in a lab is challenging. It demands recreating the unique helical alignment of muscle cells to produce a twisting motion as the heart beats. This twisting motion is assumed to be critical for pumping high volumes of blood. This, however, has never been experimentally proven because creating an artificial heart with different geometries and alignments has never been accomplished.
Recently, bioengineers from the US have proven this hypothesis by developing the first biohybrid model of human ventricles with helically aligned beating cardiac cells. The Focused Rotary Jet Spinning (FRJS) technique was used to build this intricate model. FRJS enabled the high-throughput fabrication of helically aligned fibers which directed cell alignment, allowing for the formation of controlled scaffolds in three dimensions. The scaffolds were then seeded with mice cardiomyocytes…
