Oxford builds ‘organs-on-a-chip’ to unlock new heart therapies
Oxford scientists have developed a connected ‘multi-organoid’ model that replicates how immune cells respond to heart injury, offering a new way to test treatments.
The lab-grown system shows how immune cells react to cardiac damage in a dish.
This fills a major gap in heart research, as the human heart cannot regenerate and patient biopsies cannot provide suitable tissue for study.
Co-lead author Dr Jasmeet Reyat is a research fellow at Imperial’s National Heart and Lung Institute.
Reyat said: “This system allowed us to model the recruitment of immune cells to an injured heart for the first time.
“Animal and fish models have major limitations, and a problem in the field of human modelling has been the lack of an immune component – which is so essential to the process of injury and repair.
“It opens up opportunities to study not just heart disease, but the many conditions where immune cells and tissues interact in health and repair.”
Immune cells are central to how the heart recovers from injury, affecting patient outcomes after heart attacks and other conditions.
Until now, there has been no human model to reproduce these interactions outside the body.
Researchers at the Radcliffe Department of Medicine created the model by linking human bone marrow and heart organoids – miniature lab-grown versions of organs derived from induced pluripotent stem cells.
These are adult cells reprogrammed to an embryonic-like state so they can develop into any cell type.
The organoids were connected with a 3D-printed device, allowing cells and fluid to move between them.
When the heart organoid was injured, immune cells from the bone marrow organoid migrated into the tissue – mimicking, for the first time in a dish, the immune response to cardiac injury.
Earlier attempts used immune cells taken from donor blood and added to engineered heart tissue, but these were inconsistent and difficult to scale, limiting research and therapy development.
“This means we’ve added a vital missing component to experimental models of cardiac injury,” said Dr Abdullah Khan, RDM principal investigator at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine.
“It’s still astonishing that from just a handful of stem cells we can grow two different human organs and make them communicate with each other.”
As research moves towards human-based experimental models, the platform provides a scalable way to study how the immune system and heart interact.
The team says it could be adapted to include other organoid types, making it a versatile tool for disease research and drug testing.
