Heart disease is deadly because the heart, unlike other organs, cannot repair itself.
To create a human heart from scratch,researchers need to replicate the unique structures that make up the heart. This includes recreating a spiral geometry that creates a sinuous movement as the heart beats.
So SEAS bioengineers developed the first suchmodel of the human ventricle with spirally aligned beating heart cells and showed that muscle alignment does significantly increase the volume of blood that the ventricle can pump with each contraction.
This achievement was made possible thanks tousing a new method of additive manufacturing of textiles – Focused Rotary Jet Spinning (FRJS), which produces helically aligned fibers with diameters ranging from a few micrometers to hundreds of nanometers at high throughput.