Beating arrhythmias with a heart in a dish

In the future, doctors will be able to create tiny replicas of your tissues in the lab, and then test them against a range of drugs, revealing exactly which treatments would work best for you before you even visit a drug store. This future of personalised medicine is driven by researchers such as Dr. Robert Kass of the Columbia University Medical Center. Kass and colleagues have pioneered the use of stem cells to develop personalized treatments for a genetic heart condition that disrupts normal heart rhythms. The researchers reprogrammed a patient's skin cells into stem cells called induced pluripotent stem cells (or iPSCs for short), and they then induced the iPSCs to turn into heart cells. This allowed the research team to study how genetic mutations in the resulting heart cells affect the heart’s ion channels. Their research revealed that a mutation in a specific sodium channel was causing dangerous heart rhythms and that combining the drug mexiletine with a pacemaker device to increase heart rate, provided an effective and personalised treatment.