22 February 2019
What do self-driving cars, solar airplanes and renewable energy have in common with the human heart? At first thought, not a great deal, yet a recent scientific endeavour called the Living Heart Project has brought together experts in engineering, aeronautics and energy to produce a sophisticated new model of the human heart for use in medical research. This 21st century approach to understanding heart disease is vitally important and of particular relevance in February – American Heart Month. Heart failure is a serious problem affecting 26 million people worldwide; heart disease causes 1 in 4 deaths annually in America. It can occur at any age, but becomes more common as we get older. Plus, different forms of heart failure affect men and women differently and require different treatments.
Efforts like the Living Heart Project are long overdue, survival rates for heart failure patients have not improved since the 1990s. Despite a half-century of research funding and countless rodent experiments, translation of animal data to people has been poor to non-existent. Not surprising perhaps, considering the differences in size and development, heart rates, oxygen consumption, contractility, protein expression, and stem cell populations between humans and rodents. Calls for ‘improved animal models’ for human heart disease favored larger animals – such as dogs – due to closer resemblance of cardiac physiology between dogs and humans (compared to rats and humans). Experimental induction of heart failure in the young, healthy dogs employed as models is severe – often requiring complex, extensive surgery – and distressing. In addition to these ethical concerns, there are scientific reasons to move away from canine models of heart failure – the collateral coronary circulation in dogs creates inconsistency and heterogeneity in the response to myocardial lesions which make comparison of post-injury outcomes difficult. [Read more…]