A microphysiological setup to mimic, test and analyze myocardial tissue for cardiovascular diseases

Creating cardiac tissue models for drug testing before clinical trials is still a major challenge in drug discovery. This is mainly because it is difficult to replicate the complex nature of cardiac tissue in a lab setting. One of the biggest challenges is accurately mimicking the functional features of the heart muscle. This is largely due to the immaturity of the cells used in these models, which makes it difficult to get reliable results that can be translated to human patients. Currently, in vivo models are the gold standard for evaluating new treatments. However, it is widely accepted that these animal models cannot fully reproduce human physiological responses. As a result, this mismatch often leads to failures in subsequent clinical trials. In this work, we designed two cardiac culture experiments, using GCampp6-infected cardiomyocytes, on a microfluidic chip. One of them is an aligned 2D model, and the other is a 3D tissue grown in a hydrogel of methacrylated gelatin (GelMa) and methacrylated hyaluronic acid (HaMa), the calcium traces of both were analysed at the network level, being able to obtain parameters that determine the degree of maturity and connectivity of the culture. In this way, we can ensure that we have a reproducible environment for future drug testing.