Robotic fish could fight the tide of heart failure

A groundbreaking project involving artificial fish and cells from a human heart could advance heart treatments such as pacemakers.

Researchers at Harvard University and Emory University built ‘biohybrid fish’ using paper, plastic, gelatin and two strips of heart muscle cells.

When the cells contracted, the tails flapped from side to side, powering the fish through the water for about 20 seconds.

Study author Kit Parker, a Seas professor, said:

“The benefit of this fish project is that we are still trying to master the craft of using live cells as an engineering substrate.

“The heart is extremely complex and it’s not enough to mimic the anatomy.

“One must recreate the biophysics in order to have the robust behaviour required of building engineered hearts for children born with malformed hearts.”

The researchers were unsure how long the school of artificial fish would function. However, they continued to swim for more than 100 days.

“By replicating the biophysics of the heart into this fish, we were activating various processes within these cells that are designed to help them sustain themselves,” Parker said.

“We are hoping that in our next endeavour, we will keep these cells and these tissues alive much longer than even four and a half months.”

The muscle cells also grew stronger with more exercise, suggesting that the technology could be used to treat heart failures.

Parker added:

“We learned what we needed to learn, we have adapted the inventions to our current efforts to understand paediatric disease.

“And now we are moving on to try to build a more complex model of a three-dimensional marine organism using human cardiac cells and human cardiac biophysics.”