The fish has motion like a zebrafish and is powered by heartbeats. This fish can save a person’s life one day.
With the severe shortage of donor organs, researchers are genetically engineering pigs to make hearts that doctors can transplant in humans. However, a team at Harvard University is working on a different approach to making artificial hearts using cardiac stem cells.
Although they are far from that, they turned the cells into a fish-shaped biohybrid creation and see if it’ll swim. Achieving success, they made the first-ever autonomous biohybrid device from heart cells derived from human stem cells.
Professor Kit Parker said,
“Our ultimate goal is to build an artificial heart to replace a malformed heart in a child”
“Rather than using heart imaging as a blueprint, we are identifying the key biophysical principles that make the heart work, using them as design criteria, and replicating them in a system, a living, swimming fish, where it is much easier to see if we are successful.”
Human Cells and Non-Biological Material
The name of the creation is such because it is a combination of human cells with non-biological material, for example, gelatin, paper body, and plastic floater. However, the researchers did not use any real fish material.
The main feature of the heart is that it beats. Moreover, the same applies to the constituent cells. The team turned 73,000 stem cells into cardiac muscle cells and painted them into a zebra-shaped structure. In addition to two layers of muscle cells on each side of the tail fin. The muscles on every side have retinal proteins sensitive to lights of different colors. The cells beat out of sync using alternating light colors.
The fish was ‘pushed forward’ with this motion, demonstrating that the cells can maintain it for 108 days when swimming in a glucose-enriched salt solution.
