Nina Tandon uses electricity to get living cells to do useful things. "Our bodies are electrical beings," says the electrical and biomedical engineer at Columbia University's Laboratory for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering in New York. "One of the first things that happens in a developing embryo is that electrical currents start flowing. The signals tell the cells where to go, how to differentiate – if you reverse them, you can get the heart on the right, or flip the liver around. I want to harness that fact and get cells to do other things."
Tandon's primary work is with neonatal heart cells, which can be made to link up with each other and beat independently once exposed to pulses of electricity, as with a pacemaker. "We cultivate cells in advanced culture systems called bioreactors, which are like petri dishes outfitted with electrodes and pumps, then expose them to a short burst of electricity between one and ten V/cm -- about three hertz for rat cells and one for human," she says. "Eventually they start beating together by themselves."
Tandon, 33, began her career as an electrical engineer working in telecommunications. But, while taking an evening class in physiology at a community college in New Jersey, she started to see parallels between electrical engineering and the body. "I looked at DNA and thought:
'hard drive'. I found the equations governing the transmission of signals along nerves were the same ones developed for transatlantic cables. I applied to grad school and made a shift into biology. I did electrical engineering at MIT, then bioelectrical at MIT, then biomedical at Columbia."
In the long term, the work Tandon and her colleagues are doing could accelerate our ability to grow organs for transplant. "This will happen," she says, "but it will take a long time, maybe 15 to 30 years for an organ like a heart, perhaps ten years for bone." In the meantime, she is working on
producing miniaturised tissues, such as a 3mm heart. "We could make 1,000 miniature human hearts for use in pharmaceutical trials," she says. "This would give much more useable results than animal tests -- and save a lot of laboratory mice."