Beating 'mini-heart' derived from patient's blood cells offers personalized disease model

A team from the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Center (The Institute) have created a three-dimensional, beating heart-on-a-chip, or "mini-heart," using blood cells from a patient with dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), a leading cause of heart transplantation. The new model could help researchers better understand the mechanisms underlying DCM, accelerate the evaluation of new treatments and, ultimately, explore the potential of patient-specific models to evaluate how an individual's heart tissue responds to different therapies. The study was recently published in Advanced Healthcare Materials.

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