Scientists have created a three-dimensional "heart-on-a-chip" (HOC) that could provide a breakthrough in the fight against the world's leading cause of death, cardiovascular disease.

One major challenge is that we cannot easily test how a human heart will react to a drug or disease without putting someone at risk. This engineered heart tissue beats on its own, it mobilizes calcium to initiate muscular activity, and it responds predictably to common drugs.

It's the first to incorporate a dual-sensing platform that provides real-time tracking of activity throughout the heart tissue down to the cellular level.

In a recent paper, scientists from multiple Canadian institutions describe how they achieved this "significant advance in cardiac tissue engineering and pharmacological testing."

The key advance here is the integration of sensors that can detect both macro-scale and micro-scale cardiac activity. Both current HOC platforms and the research team's previous iteration, described in a 2024 paper, lack high-resolution cellular-level sensing.