Beating heart created in lab
Jan 16, 2008
Heart from dead rat beats after repopulation with live cells.
Using the shells of dead hearts scientists have created beating, "bio-artificial" rat and pig hearts.
There's still a long way to go - but researcher say the results hold promise as a new source of human hearts and other organs for transplant.
"Going forward, our goal is to use a patient's stem cells to build a new heart".
"We just took nature's own building blocks to build a new organ. When we saw the first heartbeats, we were speechless.
The researchers first took the heart from a dead rat and washed it in detergents to get rid of all the dead cells. All that was left behind was the fibrous shell of the dead heart.
They did the same thing with a pig heart, "showing that this technology can be scaled to hearts of human size and complexity. We have also applied this technique to a variety of mammalian organs including lung, liver, kidney, and muscle”.
"At first we focused on the heart - but our hope is, if you need it, we can make it". "If our research becomes applicable to humans, which we hope it will, it has the potential to save millions of lives”.
There are major hurdles to overcome. One is to find a source of cells to repopulate the dead-heart scaffold. Researchers team hope to be able to use stem cells for this purpose, as taking living cells from a donor heart would require too many hearts to be practical.
Another hurdle is to show that these laboratory-grown hearts can function inside a living animal.
Source: webmd.com
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