On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Brett Volment. Heart diseases represent the leading causes of death worldwide. Researchers commonly use cellular and animal models to investigate and study cardiovascular disease and other diseases. However, these models do not provide the best representation of human physiology. To this end, Brett’s work focuses on growing and creating miniature 3D human hearts, termed “heart organoids” that allow more faithful insight toward heart development, disease mechanisms and effective treatments for heart disease. Brett creates these mini hearts using human stem cells and mimics the environment present in the fetus to advance their maturity. In doing so, he elicits 3D hearts with all major cell types found in the human heart, internal chambers representing atria and ventricles, and a dynamic vessel network. This system represents a powerful tool that researchers can use to investigate human heart development and to screen for disease therapeutics, and ultimately, serves as a major stepping stone towards generating fully synthetic human hearts from stem cells.

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