Inventors at the U.T. Health Science Center didn’t build a better mouse trap. They built a better device to test a mouse heart.
Mice are amazing models for human health. Now that both the human and mouse genomes have been mapped, scientists can tweak the genes of mice and test new therapies for heart failure.
The biggest question mark? How to test the strength of the animal’s frenetic heart, thumping at 600 beats a minutes.
“The mouse heart is the size of an eraser on a pencil, and it’s beating at the speed of a hummingbird’s wings,” explained Dr. Marc Feldman, a UTHSC cardiologist and researcher. “So it’s going so fast, there has not been a tool to measure the muscle strength.”
A catheter system for these tiny rodent lab animals has been 10 years in the making. Feldman and his UTHSC colleagues teamed up with engineers at U.T. Austin to come up with the new system.
The catheter is thin, about as thick as a few human hairs. During delicate microsurgery, it’s inserted into the tip of the mouse’s heart, where an electrical field captures data on blood volume and pressure that can tell scientists about the heart’s strength.
Feldman calls it “pure biomedical engineering. It’s physiologists and physicians and engineers from two different worlds working together to create an invention that neither one could do alone,” he said.
The mouse catheter system has been commercialized by a Canadian company that’s sold more than 40 units all over the world. It’s an invention that will advance human health with the smallest of tools.
The U.T. institutions hold six patents on this technology that could lead to breakthroughs in the way heart failure is treated.
