Engineered heart tissues for better health and longer life | Milica Radisic | TEDxVaughan

Beating cells of the human heart cannot regenerate on their own, thus doctors lack regenerative options and pharmaceutical industry is faced with using cell lines and animals in their discovery efforts. As a result, many promising drugs are abandoned early on and some dangerous drugs reach humans. Clearly, human heart tissue is critically needed to both treat patients and discover new drugs. In this presentation, Dr. Radisic will describe how to engineer a mature, beating human heart tissue using stem cells and microfabrication technologies similar to those used in electronics industry.

Human heart muscle cannot regenerate by itself. It is impossible to sample a small portion of human heart and make more beating cells out of it to treat patients suffering from heart disease. This limitation also impacts pharmaceutical industry, which does not have suitable human heart tissues for testing of drug safety and efficacy. Dr. Radisic willpresent recent advances in the fields of stem cells and tissue engineering that enable growth of a fully functional human heart tissue. These advances could revolutionize drug discovery process and treatment of patients with heart disease. Dr. Milica Radisic is Professor at the University of Toronto and Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Functional Cardiovascular Tissue Engineering. She obtained B.Eng. from McMaster University in 1999, and Ph.D. form the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004. She is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

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