Custom Heart Cells Enter Production

Researchers at the Madison, Wisconsin-based Cellular Dynamics International (CDI) have recently started shipping out custom, made-to-order heart cells, which are derived directly from a patient's own body. The new technology relies on stem-cell manipulation to revert cells harvested from the blood or other tissue of people back to their pluripotent state. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) can then be made to differentiate into any type of tissue in the body, including that of the heart. The new production ability could have significant implications for research in heart diseases and drug evaluation, the CDI team adds, quoted by Technology Review.

The electrodynamics of both healthy and diseased heart cells could also be investigated using these custom creations, they add. New drugs and vaccines could have their short- and long-term effects tested on these artificial cells first, rather than moving straight from mice and primate studies to human clinical trials. The team named its innovation iCell Cardiomyocites, and explained that they were derived by chemically altering already-differentiated cells collected from the blood streams, bone marrow, or livers of patients requesting CDI's assistance. The first batches of iCells were delivered just last month.

“One of the biggest advantages of these cells is we can make them in quantity and on demand. Before, you had to get heart cells from a cadaver, so there was a limited supply,” Robert Paley, the CEO at CDI, says. One of the keys to the company's immediate success is the fact that its science team is led by Co-founder and stem-cell pioneer James Thomson, who is an expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM). He was among the first scientists to publish data on how any type of cell in the body could be reverted to an iPS state, alongside Japanese physician and geneticist Shinya Yamanaka. The work on which CDI was built was published in the journals Science and Cell in 2007.

“Using these cells to find out which drugs work on an individual's cells based on their genetics is a very promising new technology, though we have yet to see how promising,” Leroy Hood, a geneticist at the Seattle-based Institute for Systems Biology, adds. At $1,000 per vial, the iCells cost more than the same material harvested from a cadaver. Still, they have the net advantage of being able to generate a pulse once inserted in a petri dish, and also of being available in larger supplies. The electrodynamics of the heart beat therefore cannot be studied on cadaver heart cells. Details of the new cells were presented at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, held last week in San Francisco.