New Sensor Helps Scientists Monitor Human-Based Heart Models Beating in Real Time

Many factors influence how the heart beats, from exercise and rest to disease and medications. Monitoring both the rate and strength of heart contractions helps scientists understand how drugs, genetic differences, diseases, and other factors affect heart function.

For decades, cardiology research used animals to study heart disease and test new drugs. However, animal hearts do not always behave in the same way as human hearts, particularly when it comes to electrical activity and drug responses. These differences can lead to treatments that appear promising in animals failing during human clinical trials.

The development of cardiac organoids, or tiny, lab-grown models of human heart tissue, has given researchers a more accurate way to study how the human heart responds to drugs and disease. Organoids can be created from a patient's own cells, which can help researchers predict how that individual will respond to different treatments, paving the way for more personalized therapies and providing a major advantage over animal experiments. Until now, however, a limitation has been that each organoid had to be grown and monitored individually on wired sensors. Scientists have now developed a wireless sensor that can monitor the contractions of many cardiac organoids at the same time. This technology makes it much easier to study cardiac function and could accelerate the testing of new drugs.

Associate Professor Timothée Mouterde, one of the study's authors, said the new approach 

"has a key advantage over animal testing as we can directly test drug treatments on human tissue, opening the way for future more personalised drug therapies which consider a person’s individual genetics."

As this technology continues to develop, it could help researchers discover safer, more effective heart disease treatments while reducing animal use.