How to Heal a Broken Heart

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S. and the world, and damage to the heart is hard to repair – often requiring surgery. But what if other treatments like gene therapy could offer new, less invasive approaches to heart care? That’s why Duke biomedical engineer Nenad Bursac is growing beating human heart tissue in a lab: to test these therapies. Using these patches of heart tissue as testbeds, his lab and collaborators can experiment. For example, the lab is testing a gene therapy that repairs heart tissue damaged from heart attacks. The effort has…