These Worcester researchers are using spinach to grow human heart tissue
Spinach is giving a whole new meaning to the term “super food.”
A team of researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Arkansas State University-Jonesboro published a paper on Wednesday that outlines how they used spinach to grow human heart tissue.
“Adapting abundant plants that farmers have been cultivating for thousands of years for use in tissue engineering could solve a host of problems limiting the field,” Glenn Gaudette, a co-author of the paper and professor of biomedical engineering at WPI, said in a release.
The team found that plants and animals have similar vascular network structures. This led them to conduct a series of experiments in which they stripped spinach leaves of their plant cells and seeded the spinach veins with the human cells that line blood vessels.
Heart muscle cells were then planted on the spinach leaves, and capillaries were able to carry the necessary blood and nutrients to the muscle cells. The cells grew strong enough to contract like a muscle after just five days.
Researchers believe the study can open doors to use spinach leaves to grow healthy heart tissue for those who have suffered heart attacks.
Check out a video presentation of the research below.
https://youtu.be/6iUrxGo9gZs
