Aitor Aguirre doesn’t describe his work as futuristic. He describes it as necessary.
For decades, scientists have relied on animal models to study heart disease, test drugs and understand how the human heart develops and fails. Those models have been invaluable, but they have limits. A mouse heart is not a human heart. Its electrical rhythms are different. Its physiology is different. Some of the most common human heart conditions simply do not unfold the same way in animals.
At Michigan State University, Aguirre, associate professor of biomedical engineering and chief of the division of developmental and stem cell biology in MSU’s IQ, or Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering, is changing that equation by building human hearts in a dish — living, beating heart organoids grown from human stem cells.