Project 458272

Introduction: The recent worldwide COVID-19 pandemic is known for its damaging effects on the lungs of infected patients, however new research is starting to show that it can also damage the heart. Using advanced biological methods, patient stem cells can be used to create a 3D heart tissue model, called Biowire II. Appearing as stretched dog bone-shaped tubes, the beating force can be measured by observing the bending of the wire that the Biowire heart tissue is attached to. The amount of force corresponds to the health of the tissue. Aim 1: To increase the processing speed of the Biowire II system, I will use computer programming and artificial intelligence to automatically measure the wire bending. This will allow a much larger number of Biowire tissues to be tested in each experiment, greatly improving the data collected when looking at the impact of COVID-19 on the heart. Aim 2: Healthy Biowire II heart tissues will be infected with COVID-19 at different amounts of infection. Over two weeks the tissues will be monitored for the effects of COVID-19 by measuring their change in force. Aim 3: After COVID-19 infection, I will study how the virus impacts people with heart damaged caused by long term high blood pressure. To re-create this heart damage in the Biowire tissues, I will treat them with specific biological compounds before infecting the tissues with the virus. Sex, Gender and Diversity Considerations: To ensure that the experiment results represent both male and female sexes, stem cells from both sexes will be used. In future studies, I plan to use hormonal treatment strategies on male and female cell lines to study how COVID-19 effects heart tissue in individual who have undergone gender reassignment. Significance: This research project will create a new method for investigating how COVID-19 effects the human heart by using the 3D Biowire heart tissue platform, potentially enabling new treatment strategies.