When Abhishek Jain and Ankit Kumar spotted a student playing accordion outside an engineering building at Texas A&M University, they weren't just listening to music—they were watching the future of medical research unfold. The two researchers had been wrestling for years with a frustrating problem: no machine could replicate the way blood actually flows through the human body. But the instrument's expandable bellows suddenly gave them an idea.
"The accordion instrument has these bellows in the middle that can expand and contract," said Jain, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Texas A&M in College Station, Texas. "It's this geometry that allows you to create air pressure without too much effort."
The result is HemaDyne, a first-of-its-kind pump that can perfectly recreate any human blood flow pattern in the lab. Published in the journal Nature Communications, the device represents a major step forward for "lab-on-a-chip" technology—tiny systems that use real human cells to mimic organs and blood vessels outside the body.
For decades, scientists have used these microphysiological systems to study heart disease and test new drugs without relying on animal testing. But a major roadblock held them back: existing pumps couldn't match the complex, rapid pulses of blood generated by a beating heart. "The human blood flow arising from the heartbeat is made of multiple pulses, multiple wavelengths, and it happens over a very short period of time," Jain said. "You need a change in flow within 50 milliseconds. That cannot be delivered by the pump equipment currently available."
When blood flow patterns change due to disease, aging, or even zero gravity in space, the cells lining our blood vessels begin to malfunction, potentially leading to life-threatening conditions. The HemaDyne pump lets researchers take any blood flow pattern recorded from a real patient and replay it in the lab, watching how cells respond in real time. "You can investigate the very beginning of vascular diseases and how they form so that they can be solved using therapeutics early on," said Kumar, who recently earned his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at Texas A&M.
The breakthrough came from an unlikely source: a $1 plastic glue dispenser with accordion folds. Kumar adapted firmware from 3D printers—using a coding language called G-code—to translate patient blood flow data into physical waveforms the device could reproduce. The researchers say the portable device can run for months and could even be sent to space to study how zero gravity affects the circulatory system. "This changes everything," Jain said. "We finally have a tool that lets us see exactly how blood flow disorders begin—and stop them before they progress into life-changing diseases."