Can a beating heart tissue grow on a spinach leaf? Yes, and WPI did it. – The Boston Globe

Scientists have made progress toward solving a fundamental challenge in the quest to engineer human tissue. They have a colleague who likes spinach to thank.

A team from Worcester Polytechnic Institute joining researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Arkansas State University has grown a piece of heart tissue on a leaf of spinach that beats and sends fluids through the vascular system just like a human heart would.

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Their findings are being published this May in the scientific journal Biomaterials.

Researchers stripped the spinach of its plant cells and cultured human heart tissue in its place. The hope is that by using plants naturally occurring network of veins scientists will be able to grow organs vastly more complex than what current 3D technology allows, said Tanja Dominko, associate professor of biology and biotechnology at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

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One of the broadest challenges for tissue engineering is how to make [the tissue] clinically viable, Dominko said. To do that, it needs to be big. But engineered tissues dont survive well at large sizes. So we looked to where these kinds of circulatory systems exist in nature.

It turns out that plants have a very similar system and thought how much engineering would be needed to grow tissue on a plant? It turns out, not much, she said.

The idea to use spinach came about because someone in the office always had it for lunch, Dominko said.

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Dominko said the hope is that tissues could be grown on plants before being grafted onto damaged organs inside the human body. While this is very exciting news, Dominko said, it could still be a long time before that becomes a reality.

Its almost impossible to say with things like this, she said. You look at things like stem cell therapy. That was discovered 20 years ago, but its still rare. It might take a long time, but Im hopeful that it wont.

The next step is to take some plant-grown tissue in mammal subjects and see how the body reacts, Dominko said.

Weve designed an experiment to see how a mammalian system reacts to the new tissue. Well watch for any kind of adverse reaction like system failure and what happens when the plant structure eventually gives out, she said.

While getting a plant-grown heart, lung, or muscle may be years away, there is no doubt that seeing what was a once-green spinach leaf beat with life is exciting.

As the researchers wrote in their study, The development of decellularized plants ... opens up the potential for a new branch of science.

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Can a beating heart tissue grow on a spinach leaf? Yes, and WPI did it. - The Boston Globe