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Podcast: Printing Functional Hearts & Reverse Engineering Microbes

In this episode, we talk about how researchers are developing tools to better understand how different microbial communities impact our health in an effort to reverse engineer them and the critical methodology used to 3D print functional heart ventricles.

Farbod Moghaddam

fromThe Next Byte

02 Aug, 2022.

Podcast: Printing Functional Hearts & Reverse Engineering Microbes

Topic

Manufacturing

EPISODE NOTES

(1:05) - Machine Learning Understands the Human Gut

(15:43) - A Major Step Forward in Organ Biofabrication

As always, you can find these and other interesting & impactful engineering articles on Wevolver.com.

To learn more about this show, please visit our shows page. By following the page, you will get automatic updates by email when a new show is published. Be sure to give us a follow and review on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and most of your favorite podcast platforms!

AboutMouser Electronics

Mouser Electronics is a worldwide leading authorized distributor of semiconductors and electronic components for over 800 industry-leading manufacturers. We specialize in the rapid introduction of new products and technologies for design engineers and buyers. Our extensive product offering includes

Industry

Electronics

Headquarters

Mansfield, TX, USA

Founded

1964

Company Size

1001-5000

AboutThe Next Byte

The Next Byte Podcast is hosted by two young engineers - Daniel and Farbod - who select the most interesting tech/engineering content on Wevolver.com and deliver it in bite-sized episodes that are easy to understand regardless of your background. If you'd like to stay up to date with our latest ep

Industry

Entertainment

Headquarters

Washington D.C., DC, USA

Founded

2020

A major step forward for organ biofabrication

By recreating the helical structure of heart muscles, researchers improve understanding of how the heart beats

fromHarvard University

14 Jul, 2022.

This article was discussed in our Next Byte podcast.

The full article will continue below.

Heart disease — the leading cause of death in the U.S. — is so deadly in part because the heart, unlike other organs, cannot repair itself after injury. That is why tissue engineering, ultimately including the wholesale fabrication of an entire human heart for transplant, is so important for the future of cardiac medicine.

To build a human heart from the ground up, researchers need to replicate the unique structures that make up the heart. This includes recreating helical geometries, which create a twisting motion as the heart beats. It’s been long theorized that this twisting motion is critical for pumping blood at high volumes, but proving that has been difficult, in part because creating hearts with different geometries and alignments has been challenging.

Now, bioengineers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed the first biohybrid model of human ventricles with helically aligned beating cardiac cells, and have shown that muscle alignment does, in fact, dramatically increases how much blood the ventricle can pump with each contraction.

This advancement was made possible using a new method of additive textile manufacturing, Focused Rotary Jet Spinning (FRJS), which enabled the high-throughput fabrication of helically aligned fibers with diameters ranging from several micrometers to hundreds of nanometers. Developed at SEAS by Kit Parker’s Disease Biophysics Group, FRJS fibers direct cell alignment, allowing for the formation of controlled tissue engineered structures.

The research is published in Science.

“This work is a major step forward for organ biofabrication and brings us closer to our ultimate goal of building a human heart for transplant,” said Parker, the Tarr