OSPE - The Voice - September 2016 - 14

Cover older people are more likely to find themselves facing chronic, by Japanese scientist and Nobel Prize winner interrelated health conditions. Shinya Yamanaka. The stem cells are then placed If we look at heart disease alone, nine in 10 Canadians over into a liquid where proteins encourage them to the age of 20 have at least one risk factor for heart disease, while turn into cardiac cells. four in 10 have three or more risk factors. As the Heart and While growing immature heart cells in a lab Stroke Foundation points out: is not new, raising them to behave like an adult * An estimated 1.6 million Canadians live with heart disease or is. Using a device that jolts the patches of tissue the effects of a stroke with a series of shocks, the cells are stimulated and * Each year, more than 350,000 Canadians are hospitalized for beat in a way that mimics an adult's heart muscle. heart disease or stroke Dr. Radisic obtained a patent for her electrically * In 2012, more than 66,000 Canadians died from heart disease stimulated "heart patch" in 2005, and also joined or stroke - that's one person every seven minutes U of T Engineering that year to develop her heart * In 2011, heart disease was ranked the second leading cause of patch further. death in Canada. But the human tissues engineered in Dr. One researcher making significant waves in the fields of Radisic's lab don't just behave like a real heart - cardiac tissue engineering and regenerative medicine is Milica the cells look like the real thing too. Prior to Dr. Radisic, P.Eng., Ph.D. Dr. Radisic is a professor at the Institute of Radisic's research, human cells and tissues grown Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering, and the Department of lying flat in a petri dish often looked very different Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry at the University from those in real heart tissues. of Toronto (U of T), as well as Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) Using their expertise in microfabrication, in Functional Cardiovascular Tissue Engineering. She obtained Dr. Radisic's team built innovative scaffolds for her B.Eng. from McMaster University in 1999 and Ph.D. from the cells to grow on. In 2013, the team created the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2004. the Biowire method. With this method, cells are Although she was fascinated with the universe, stars, grown around a silk strand that stands in for fibres found in the and planets as a child, and even dreamed of becoming an human heart. By seeding the cells around the strand and using astrophysicist, Radisic's career took a different turn. One night electrical currents to simulate a heartbeat, Dr. Radisic's team while working in a lab as a grad student at MIT, Dr. Radisic noticed was able to "train" the heart cells to stretch and mature the way how individual cardiomyocyte were they would in a human. pulsing when she applied an electrical To commercialize Biowire, Dr. stimulus from a carbon electrode. Radisic reached out to former i hope to prove that engineered She wondered if applying the same MIT colleague and professor tissues are useful in discovery of electrical impulses to multiple cells of Biomedical Engineering at would cause them to beat together, Columbia University in New York, new drugs and i hope that at least simulating the contractions of the Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, Ph.D., one of our biomaterials will be used engineered heart tissue during who specializes in tissue engineering growth in the laboratory. Her passion techniques. The pair gained the to help patients. was to do something that benefited attention of venture capital firm - Milica Radisic, P.Eng., Ph.D. human health. So Radisic began Harris and Harris Group Inc., and working on engineering functional founded TARA Biosystems Inc. The cardiac tissues using rat cells in 1999. company is offering its services to The heart, unlike other organs in the body, has very little pharmaceutical companies interested in having their drugs ability to repair itself by generating new cells. This makes it tested on the Biowire platform. To date, six drug companies hard to heal the heart after injury. Although drugs, surgery and have approached TARA Biosystems Inc. to validate the new drug assistive devices can all help to partly restore the function of a testing platform. Dr. Radisic and Dr. Vunjak-Novakovic hope failing heart, Dr. Radisic believes the best way for more people to TARA will be the first place companies choose to determine survive heart disease is to find out how to help the heart fix itself. whether their drugs have negative effects on the heart. Dr. Radisic's research could result in completely new treatments Aside from advancing science's understanding of heart attacks for damaged and failing hearts, as well as tissues for use in such and disease, the mini-heart tissues could also revolutionize the areas as bone and wound healing. pharmaceutical industry. Testing drugs on lab-grown tissues is In her lab today at U of T Engineering, Dr. Radisic and one way pharmaceutical companies can get detailed information her team transform human stem cells into miniature, beating on how a drug will perform in the body before proceeding to heart tissues. Using human skin biopsies, skin cells are clinical trials. Helping drug companies detect dangerous side re-programmed into stem cells using a technique made famous effects before reaching the market will lead to safer and more 14 The VOICe September 2016

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