27 Aug Optical imaging technique gives a closer look at new ways to grow heart cells
Danielle Desa
While cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States, there are barriers to studying and modeling heart disease in the laboratory. The specialized muscle cells that make up a beating heart, called cardiomyocytes, are difficult to grow and maintain using traditional cell culture techniques.
New research published in the journal Biophotonics Discovery describes an imaging method to observe stem-cell derived cardiomyocytes grown in a variety of biosynthetic hydrogels and assess the ideal conditions for successful growth.
Morgridge Postdoctoral Fellow Danielle Desa adapted optical imaging techniques she learned with the Melissa Skala Lab to support stem cell biology research in the Bioinspired Materials Lab led by William Murphy, UW–Madison professor of biomedical engineering and orthopedics and rehabilitation.
“The goal is having something that will be tunable and reproducible,” Desa says. “The dream application of using these synthetic materials would be for biomanufacturing, because you’d want something robust and repeatable.”