A factory for health advances

In a windowless fourth-floor lab high above the University of Colorado’s Folsom Field, postdoctoral research associate Brooke Harrison squints through a microscope at a pulsing cell from a rat heart. Nearby, a 6-foot-long Burmese python lies coiled in its cage.

What would happen if you bathed the heart of a mammal in the blood of a just-fed python?

This seemingly obscure question has driven Harrison’s research for months, as he and colleagues in the lab of biology professor Leslie Leinwand work to unravel the mysteries behind the python’s unique physiology in hopes of developing better drugs for human heart disease.

“It won’t…