SAN JOSE, Calif. — The attack of the COVID-19 virus on the human heart is completely hidden from view, revealed only by the damage that's left behind.
But San Francisco scientists have designed a way to witness the assault. In lab-grown globules of throbbing heart cells, they can watch signs of distress, then death.
By creating disease in a dish, the Gladstone Institutes team hopes to better understand the mysteries of long COVID — not just in the heart, but also in other tissues. They're part of a growing international effort to study how the virus infects cells and how cells can retaliate and recover.
