Scientists seeded silicon polymer with rat heart cells to create a jellyfish-like pseudo-organism.
(Caltech and Harvard University)
Quest to build a heart gets lift from jellyfish
Scientists seeded silicon polymer with rat heart cells to create a jellyfish-like pseudo-organism.
(Caltech and Harvard University)
In their quest to build a beating heart from scratch, Harvard University researchers looked to the sea for inspiration, building a tiny swimming “jellyfish” out of rat heart cells and a thin, jellyfish-shaped polymer film. The simple aquatic creature buffeted by ocean currents may seem a world away from the human heart, but researchers found that the repetitive pulsations used by real jellyfish to swim through salt water are similar to the way the heart pumps blood through the body. “I do a lot of cardiac research, and . . . I started looking at marine life forms, [thinking] maybe we don’t understand the fundamental laws of muscular pumps,” said Kevin Kit Parker, a professor of bioengineering and applied physics at Harvard.
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