Korea’s first ‘mini heart’ with regular heart beat created

A joint research team of Konkuk University and Clicell said it has developed a heart organoid that mimics the shape and function of the human heart for the first time in Korea.

Organoids are differentiated bodies that start growing from stem cells and have an environment and cellular composition similar to those of human organs, and are also called mini-organs.

Although organoid research that mimics many organs has been actively conducted, research on cardiac organoids is lacking globally.

The research team, led by Professors Chung Hyung-min of the College of Medicine and Kim C-yoon of the College of Veterinary Medicine, and Clicell produced a heart organoid by inducing differentiation using human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs).

The developed cardiac organoid not only showed regular and spontaneous systolic and diastolic periods, but also showed the characteristics and development of a living heart, such as forming a region similar to the ventricle and atrium and retaining cardiac constituent cells such as cardiomyocytes and cardiac fibroblasts.

Also, as a result of planting differentiated cardiac organoids into matrigel, the team confirmed heart organoids as in vitro mini-hearts could be generated from hiPSCs through self-organization.

The team demonstrated that hiPSC-derived heart organoids (hHOs) sufficiently reflect the in vivo heart development process and cardiac function through results including spontaneous contraction and relaxation coupling, formation of a layer-enclosed chamber within hHOs, gene profiles close to human heart tissues, and myocardium formation.

Furthermore, when the team transplanted the vascularized heart organoids into immunodeficient mice, the organoids maintained their functionality for 10 days after transplantation without a culture medium.

"The developed hHO is not yet at a stage where it can replace the actual heart, so it is an experiment conducted to check whether the hHO can function properly,” said a member of the research team.

The research team expects that its development will become an alternative animal test method for hereditary heart disease research and cardiovascular pharmacology testing.

Biomaterials published the results of the research in its November issue.