[imagesource: Michael Rosnach, Keel Yong Lee, Sung-Jin Park, Kevin Kit Parker]

Scientists have created a bizarre “Franken-fish” made from human heart cells that can swim for over three months.

The fully autonomous artificial fish made out of cells from human heart muscles was created to emulate the contractions of a beating heart so that scientists could further study the organ and its diseases

The pioneering experiment, published in a study in Science, could also be the first step toward one day building a human heart from stem cells in a lab for transplants.

Watch how this “biohybrid” fish continuously swam for up to 108 days:

Our minds might be blown, but this is just another day at work for the Disease Biophysics Group at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), reported VICE.

The group has developed biohybrid stingrays and jellyfish from rat heart cells before, among other cool bioengineering experiments.

The group is led by Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics at Harvard, Kit Parker.

Here’s more of an explanation about how this fish works:

Parker and his colleagues took inspiration from fish that move by coordinating their body and caudal fin movements to generate propulsion as they swim, such as zebrafish and mollies.

To recreate this motion in an artificial fish, the group layered cardiomyocytes, the muscular cells responsible for heart contractions, on two sides of the biohybrid model’s tail fin.

A contraction on one side of the tail produces a stretch on the other; stretch-activated mechanosensitive proteins then kick off a constant closed-loop motion.

The team also uses a device similar to a pacemaker to keep a rhythm going so that the biohybrid fish could keep swimming with the same motion as a beating heart.

With that, the faux-fish managed to log 38 million beats over 108 days. This provides an excellent springboard from which to properly study heart conditions, particularly clockwork processes of cardiac activity, such as arrhythmia.

[source:vice]