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Innovation

Virtual drug testing: computerized human heart predicts side effects

A new computer simulation of living heart tissue can help weed out potentially harmful drugs, before they move on to animal experiments and human patients.
Written by Janet Fang, Contributor

Scientists have created a new computer model of our heart that can predict side effects of drugs used to treat abnormal heart rhythms.

This is the beginning of virtual drug-testing systems (pictured) to help protect heart patients from potentially fatal problems.

In the past century, long-term treatment for abnormal heart rhythms have often failed. There’s just no way to predict how drugs will alter the heart’s electrical behavior; sometimes they damage the heart’s electrical system, sometimes they worsen abnormal beating… all of these problems can trigger sudden death.

So, Colleen Clancy from UC Davis and colleagues developed a heart simulation that quickly scans for side effects of drugs at various concentrations, heart rates, and disease conditions.

Their model reveals how drugs interact within heart cells.

But first, this is what normally happens... Individual heart cells generate electrical signals through ion channels – which are in the cell membrane, opening and closing to allow molecules in and out. The signals spread from cell to cell, manifesting themselves as electrical waves in the heart. The waves tell heart muscles to contract at regular intervals, pumping blood to the brain and vital organs.

  1. The team modeled heart tissue by developing mathematical equations that represent the opening and closing of ion channels.
  2. Then, in order to simulate the whole heart, they developed other equations to connect these events among single cells.
  3. As drugs are mathematically fed into the model, the researchers looked for any side effects. They tested the model on 2 drugs: lidocaine and flecainide.

In a model of single heart cells, both drugs slowed down heartbeats without problems.

However, when they were applied to the whole heart tissue model, flecainide caused serious side effects – showing how the computer simulations can help weed out potentially harmful drugs.

The results were confirmed with experiments on rabbit hearts.

The study was published in Science Translational Medicine yesterday.

Image: Josh P. Tulman

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com

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