Lab-Made Jellyfish Hints at Heart Fix .

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Lab-Made Jellyfish Hints at Heart Fix .
Jellyfish Hints at Fix for Damaged Hearts - WSJ.com

Scientists hope that such techniques will make it possible to harvest cells from one organism and then reorganize them in sophisticated ways to make a bioengineered system for human use, such as a heart pacemaker that wouldn't require battery power.

Details of the experiment were published Sunday in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

"What we're trying to do is become really good at building tissue" for medical use, said Kevin Kit Parker, a bioengineer at Harvard University and a co-author of the study. "This is just practice" in the quest to reverse-engineer entire organs, he added.

Tissue-engineering experiments often rely on trial and error. Dr. Parker said he wants to bring to the field the same quantitative rigor and precision that civil engineers use in building bridges.

Dr. Parker spent years searching for a good model for the human heart. While watching a jellyfish at Boston's New England Aquarium, he was struck by how the creature used a muscle to pump its way through water, a mechanism similar to a beating heart.

His Harvard team linked up with researchers at the California Institute of Technology, and the two groups first embarked on a detailed study of jellyfish propulsion: the complex arrangement of muscles; the contracting and recoiling motion of the bodies; and the fluid dynamics resulting from their swimming motion.

The engineers used a silicone polymer to build a centimeter-long jellyfish consisting of a membrane with eight armlike appendages. They overlaid muscle cells, obtained from a rat heart, on this membrane in a particular pattern. "We coaxed them to self-organize so that they matched the [muscle] architecture of a jellyfish precisely," Dr. Parker said.
 

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