Heart Check

Any new medicine must not only solve a problem, but avoid causing harm elsewhere in the body. Damaging side effects are a key reason drug development stalls, and heart toxicity is a common pitfall. Researchers hope to identify such drawbacks in pre-clinical tests, but existing models provide a limited approximation of the heart, and there is a universal goal to reduce reliance on animal testing. A team has therefore developed a new ‘heart-on-a-chip’ platform to enable more realistic toxicity testing at an early stage. The system (pictured, with elements separately, left, and together) includes heart muscle (green), structural fibroblasts (cyan), and blood vessel lining cells (red), all derived from a single line of precursor stem cells for consistency. The lining cells helped the platform better reflect the heart’s natural defences against toxicity compared to more simple models, giving researchers a more complete picture before moving to clinical trials in people.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Karine Tadevosyan and colleagues
• Stem Cell Potency Group, Regenerative Medicine Program, Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL), L'Hospitalet De Llobregat, Spain
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
• Published in Advanced Health Care Materials, February 2026