The researchers hope that their research could provide more detailed information on the electrical activity of stem cell derived cardiomyocytes. In the longer term, this could facilitate their use in regenerating the damaged hearts of heart attack victims.
“Human embryonic stem cells promise unrivalled opportunities. However, they are difficult, time-consuming and expensive to grow in the lab”, Dr Denning explains. “Our understanding of how to convert them into cardiomyocytes is poor. At the moment we only know how to produce a few million cardiomyocytes, but to treat just one heart attack patient, we may need one billion that all function in the correct way.”
To help overcome the many challenges that stem cells bring, Dr Denning and his team plan to engineer a novel system for real-time analysis of cardiomyocytes during early development so their properties are better understood.
The team have already demonstrated that sufficient numbers of stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes can be produced for detailed analysis and they plan to use new ‘electrophysiology’ systems to record changes in the cells when cultured. Electrophysiology is the study of cells’ electrical properties and this is the first time that the method has been used in the UK to study stem cell-cardiomyocyte biology.
“This research will enable rapid development of stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes as a tool for understanding the heart and its diseases,” says Dr Denning. However, he cautions: “Before we can consider using stem cells to treat heart-attack patients there are many problems which will take many years to solve. We don’t yet know how to deliver the cells to a patient’s heart and prevent them being washed away so that they actually stay in the heart and both survive and function. It will take many years to overcome these challenges and put stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes into medical usage.” |
