A very detailed map of the human heart can guide personalized heart treatment

Scientists have created detailed cell and molecular maps of the healthy human heart to understand how this important organ works and to see what goes wrong with cardiovascular disease.

Works published in Nature September 24th was led by researchers at Harvard Medical College, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Welcome Sanger Institute, Max Delbrück Molecular Medicine Center (MDC) in Germany, Imperial College London, and its global collaborators.

The team analyzed almost 500,000 Individual cells Builds the broadest cellular atlas of the human heart to date. Atlas cell It reveals a complex network of cardiomyocyte types, cardioprotective immune cells, and blood vessels. It also predicts how cells communicate to keep the heart functioning.

Research is part of Human cell atlas An initiative that maps all cell types in the human body. Knowledge of new molecules and cells in the heart promises to enable a better understanding of the heart disease It guides the development of highly personalized therapies.

The study also prepares for future regenerative medicine-based therapies, the researchers said.

In a lifetime, the average human heart delivers over 2 billion life-sustaining heartbeats to the body. Doing so helps deliver oxygen and nutrients to cells, tissues and organs, allowing the removal of carbon dioxide and waste products. Every day, the heart beats about 100,000 times, flowing in one direction through four different chambers, and its speed changes with rest, exercise, and stress. Every beat needs to be very complex but perfectly synchronized between different cells in different parts of the heart. If this complicated adjustment goes wrong, Cardiovascular diseaseIs the leading cause of death worldwide, with an estimated 17.9 million deaths each year.

The details of the intracellular molecular processes of a healthy heart are important for understanding how things fail in heart disease. Such knowledge can lead to more accurate and better treatment strategies for various forms of cardiovascular disease.

“Millions of people are being treated for cardiovascular disease. Understanding a healthy heart is the interaction between cell types and states that enables lifelong functioning, and which of these are diseases. Helps to understand how different it is. ”Brigham and Women’s Cardiovascular Geneticist, Brabatnik Institute of Medicine, Harvard University School of Medicine.

“Ultimately, these basic insights suggest specific goals that may lead to personalized treatment in the future, create personalized medicines for heart disease, and show the therapeutic efficacy of each patient. It could improve, “Sidman said.

This is what researchers have tried to do with new research.

The team studied approximately 500,000 individual cells and nuclei from six different regions of the heart, obtained from 14 organ donors whose heart was healthy but unsuitable for transplantation.

Using a combination of single-cell analysis, machine learning, and imaging techniques, the team was able to know exactly which genes were on / off in each cell.

Researchers have found that there are significant differences in cells in different parts of the heart. They also observed that each region of the heart had a specific subset of cells. This points to different sources and suggests that these cells respond differently to treatment.

“This project provides a new understanding of how the heart is constructed from a single cell with many different cell states,” said Daniel Reichert, a genetics researcher at Harvard Medical School and co-author. It marks the beginning of. ” “With knowledge of regional differences throughout the heart, we can begin to look at the effects of age, exercise and illness and push the field of cardiology into the era of precision medicine.”

“This is the first time anyone has observed a single cell in the human heart on this scale. This is only possible with large-scale single-cell sequencing,” said Max Delbrück Center co-senior author And professor Norbert Hübner said. Molecular medicine. “This study demonstrates the power of single-cell genomics and international cooperation,” he added. “Knowledge of the full range of heart cells and their genetic activity is a fundamental need to understand how the heart works and to begin to understand how it responds to stress and disease. ..

As part of this study, researchers have examined the blood vessels that run through the heart in more detail than ever before. Atlas helps researchers understand how these venous and arterial cells adapt to different pressures and locations, and what goes wrong with blood vessels during coronary heart disease. Showed how useful it is.

“Our international efforts provide the scientific community with a valuable set of information by revealing the details of the cells and molecules of the heart cells that work together to pump blood around the body.” We mapped heart cells that could infect SARS-CoV-2 and found that specialized cells in small blood vessels were also targets for the virus, “she said. “Our dataset is a treasure trove of information to understand the subtleties of heart disease.”

Researchers also focus on understanding heart repair, how immune cells interact and communicate with other cells in a healthy heart, and how this differs from skeletal muscle. I checked.

Further research includes investigating whether heart cells can be induced to repair themselves.

“This excellent collaboration is part of the global Human Cell Atlas initiative to create’Google Maps’ for the human body,” said the study’s co-author and co-chair of Human at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Sarah Teichmann Cell Atlas Organizing Committee.

“Freely available to researchers around the world, Heart Cell Atlas is a great resource that can lead to new understandings of heart health and illness, new treatments, and even find ways to regenerate damaged ones. heart “Tissue”.