Back to basic, back to the future: searching for vital signals of life
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OMMENTARY
Back to basic, back to the future: searching for vital signals of life Jubert Marquez 1,2 & Maria Victoria Faith Garcia 1,2 & Jin Han 1,2 Received: 23 July 2020 / Revised: 23 July 2020 / Accepted: 6 August 2020 / Published online: 11 August 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
There is a widening gap between research and clinical medicine. Translational medicine aims to bridge biomedical research toward tangible and practical hospital applications. Through the years, the term has gained wide usage as grantgiving bodies and researchers alike promise to transform the medical landscape with treatments that are least invasive, target-specific, time, and cost-efficient. Despite this goal, successful research-to-practice findings have continued to decline. Bench experiments focusing on small animal models, in vitro cell and tissue cultures, brought to light numerous mechanisms of disease that present potential treatment pathways, but results from large-scale studies have been disproportionate to the volume of basic science research produced [4]. A large percentage of studies fail in transitioning toward clinical use due to stringent requirements for ethical, regulatory, financial, and legal compliance. Part of the difficulty in transitioning from research to clinical practice may be attributed to laboratory methods that, though robust, are too simplistic to be applied to the complexities attributed to the human body. Animal models and in vitro cell experiments have long been used to develop and establish medical therapies. The retrograde-perfused mammalian heart model by Oskar Langendorff is a vital modeling methodology that has remained robust since the time of its inception up until now, 125 years later. The Langendorff apparatus using murine heart remains relevant because of its replicability and simplicity while still providing vast and deep significance of studies This article is a commentary to the original article https://doi.org/10.1007/ s00424-020-02446-6 * Jin Han [email protected] 1
Department of Physiology, College of Medicine, Smart Marine Therapeutics Center, Cardiovascular and Metabolic Disease Center, Inje University, Busan 47392, Republic of Korea
2
Department of Health Sciences and Technology, BK21 Plus Project Team, Graduate School of Inje University, Busan 47392, Republic of Korea
about and related to the physiology of the heart [2]. One major disadvantage of this model is the organismal discrepancy between the animal model and the human body. The use of large animal models, however, has produced sufficient outcomes with novel findings while maintaining ethical compliance which then translates toward feasible ethical regulations for human trials [3]. In this issue of Pflügers Archiv: European Journal of Physiology, Brook et al. reimagined the conventional ex vivo Langendorff apparatus to measure electrophysiological changes resulting from gap junction uncoupling in human and porcine hearts during carbenoxolone modulation. The study utilized porcine hearts an
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