Using iPS Cells to grow Heart Cells
Scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel have succeeded in using iPS cells to grow a collection of heart cells.
What’s particularly special about these cells is that they came from a patient with one of the inherited forms of long QT syndrome. And they can be used to test new treatments for the disease.
- Long QT syndrome speeds up heartbeats, and can cause fainting. It gets its name from the abnormal electrical signals the heart gives off — signals that be seen in a patient’s EKG,
- For unknown reasons, people with long QT syndrome can go without symptoms for years, and then suddenly drop dead from cardiac arrest;
- The FDA has warned that some heart medications may exacerbate it.
As reported in the journal, Nature, the new iPS-derived heart cells developed in the lab show the same electrical irregularities of QT syndrome as the intact heart does can be good models for new drugs.
- To study a disease, scientists like to look at cells from the diseased organ. But those cells aren’t usually very easy for scientists to get their hands on;
- That’s because patients are generally reluctant to part with their brain or heart cells, diseased or not, while they’re still using them;
- Dead cells are easier to procure, but they tend to be less interesting than their living counterparts;
- A way around the problem is called an induced pluripotent stem cell, or iPS. These are ordinary skin cells — something patients are willing to donate — that are transformed into cells that can grow indefinitely in the lab and they can be coaxed into becoming any type of cell in the body.
The next step will be to see if scientists can find drugs that will correct the irregularities in the cells before trying the drugs out on humans suffering from it.
