Science: Making Popeyes of heart

Legendary cartoon character Popeye enjoying supernatural strength after eating spinach has been touted as one of the best ways of healthy living. Although health experts feel that much of the reputation of the spinach may rest on an erroneous calculation of the iron content, the association of health and spinach is destined to have a long innings.

Now, spinach is coming to the aid of human beings at a critical juncture in their quest to live long by artificially creating organs. OK, if a patient is suffering from heart failure, we can take a 3D printed scaffold, shaped just like the heart modelled on a CT scan of it, seed her own cells after converting the stem cells from her blood into cardiac muscle cells, and make a heart. This is what tissue engineering is all about.

But how to find ways of supplying blood to tissue-engineered organs and body parts? Scientists are now turning to the nature to find out ways to help its own inventions survive. One of the latest has been about turning spinach leaves into a system of finely branching tubes lined by cellulose that can mimic the arborising network of blood vessels which supply most nutrients. A network of fine, bio-compatible tubes is what we get once we remove the plant tissues.

“One of the big problems in growing replacement human tissues, bones, even whole organs to implant in people to treat disease or traumatic injuries is the inability to establish the branching network of arteries and veins down to the capillary scale that are required to deliver the oxygen, nutrients, and essential molecules required for proper tissue growth.

This potentially solves that problem,” said Joshua Robert Gershlak, one of the scientists who were part of the research team at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts in an email communication with this writer. “The veins in spinach leaves are remarkably similar to the veins and arteries in human hearts. We stripped away the plant cells, and what’s left is just the cellulose structure with the veins intact that could carry blood to nourish growing human tissue.” Gershlak explained how they went about it. “In a series of experiments, we cultured beating human heart cells on spinach leaves that were stripped of plant cells.

We flowed fluids and microbeads similar in size to human blood cells through the spinach vasculature, and we seeded the spinach veins with human cells that line blood vessels. These proof-of-concept studies open the door to using multiple spinach leaves to grow layers of healthy heart muscle to treat heart attack patients.”

Sometime in the future we will surely reach that stage when custom-made organs and body parts are possible. That will be a true revolution in medicine. Have no doubt — that is the next BIG thing.

Jimmy Mathew, a microsurgeon and writer, is part of the INFO CLINIC, an organisation sworn to fight medical misinformation and to deliver authentic health knowledge to the public.