In a scientific lab at La Trobe in Bendigo, a tiny heart – no bigger than the size of a match head – beats.
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It is the heart of a snail, and local PhD students routinely monitor its rhythm in the hopes of solving matters of the human heart.
Sara Al-Rawi and Christine Loescher are just two of those students focused on making medical advancements to bend our broken hearts.
During National Science Week, which runs to August 23, the Bendigo Advertiser caught up with their research. Sara Al-Rawi researched cancer before she jumped into the cardiovascular side of things.
“It always helps to have a reason. For cancer, my sister has just recovered from multiple melanoma, so my point was that I would add a drop into the massive ocean that is cancer research,” Ms Al-Rawi said.
She has now turned her attention to a condition that afflicts the young and frequently devastates families – sudden death syndrome. Someone between the ages of five and 35 dies from this syndrome every 16 hours.
“It could be as simple as waking up in the morning and getting startled by the alarm clock and dying,” she said.
“The prob with this particular disease is that you seem normal, there's just a very small defect in the heart.”
The syndrome often hits while people – who may not know they have an irregular heartbeat or increased heartrate – are exercising. Ms Al-Rawi is testing chemical compounds that might correct a defect that restricts heart cells getting enough potassium.
“If we manage to get compound that can slightly correct that defect, we can save that many lives,” she said.
Ms Loescher said she always wanted to pursue something in the medical field, and found her place in chemistry.
“I found the troubleshooting and the problem solving of experiments – it takes forever and you have a lot of heartache – but then you have that little win,” Ms Loescher said.
Ms Loescher is tweaking a skeletal muscle relaxant in the hopes a variation of the drug could cure problems with the heart. It’s practice she describes as “witchcraft” – mixing solutions together, creating chemical reactions, evaporating liquid and adding solvents.
“If we manipulate it slightly (it could help) in cases where you can't completely contract and completely relax (the heart),” she said.
So why the snail heart? It’s a perfect first step for experimenting, the scientists explain. It might be only a tiny fraction of the size, but as it has two chambers and similar receptors, it is eerily akin to the human heart.
