Miniature hearts can be helpful in testing potential new drugs

Recently, a group of Australian scientists conducted the first-ever screening of potential heart regeneration drugs with the usage of bioengineered human heart muscle. This move can help revolutionize how drugs for tackling heart-related diseases are developed in the future.

According to a new study published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, researchers from QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, the Murdoch Children`s Research Institute and the University of Melbourne, along with researchers from global biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca used thousands of miniature heart muscles which were grown in the lab to get rid of compounds which were toxic and did not work efficiently.

According to the lead author, James Hudson, the study also recognized two potential drug candidates which can regenerate damaged heart tissue without side effects on heart one's function.

"Currently potential new drugs are tested on heart cells or in mice but those tests don`t always accurately replicate the effects on human hearts," Hudson said. According to the study author, 90 per cent of the drugs that enter clinical trials show very promising results in the laboratory, but either don`t end up working for the patients or do not progress due to some side effects. The study used thousands of miniature hurt muscles that grew in the laboratory and that beat and behaved like human hearts.

These mini heart muscles had similar properties to a functioning human heart. They also seemed to respond to drugs in a similar way to the organ. AstraZeneca had previously identified potential new drug targets after testing about 5,000 compounds and shared more than 100 compounds with the Australian researchers for further testing in the mini-heart muscles.

Co-lead author, Enzo Porrello, said they were able to identify two compounds that may help repair the heart."Using the mini heart muscles in a dish we were able to eliminate many compounds that didn't work effectively or were damaging or toxic, and we ended up finding two potential new drug candidates that may help regenerate damaged heart tissue," he said. The study also showed that heart muscle would only regenerate if the drug treatment could turn on specific metabolic pathways - something that hadn't been shown before."It`s very early days, and there are years of testing ahead, but our research provides hope of finding therapeutics that could regenerate disease-damaged hearts," Porrello added.

Hudson highlighted that the screening model also had the potential to make drug testing cheaper, quicker, easier and more accurate for the patients."We can make hundreds of heart muscles in the lab each week and use them to discover treatments that may be beneficial for patients with heart failure, thereby reducing our reliance on using mice and keeping testing costs down," he said."Our next step is to work with AstraZeneca to improve the compounds so that they can be taken forward into pre-clinical testing," Hudson concluded.