We’ve all see video of some chicken wandering around sans their head and other various Frankensteinish type medical wonders but somehow the idea of something in a petri dish in a lab having a pulse you can measure isn’t high on the list of things to watch.

That’s a shame because even though it might be hard to believe scientists have managed, with stem cells, to create the smooth muscle cells that make up the blood vessels in your heart. Once created the cells ‘try’ to create a heart but only really get as far as being able to send out a pulse that causes the cardiac cells to contract – hence having a pulse.

Even better from a research point of view is that these disembodied heart cells are able to respond to drugs in the same way that interior heart cells would respond. The example given is that this type of petri dish testing would be able to tell doctors if a cancer patient’s heart would be able to handle chemo therapy.

It’s a little on the expensive side right for conducting tests this way, like $15,000 expensive and it also takes a year but given how fast this type of thing is advancing we could soon be able to do this for less money and take less time.

via io9