Researchers Create Beating Heart In Lab
Professor Doris Taylor and his team at the University of Minneapolis have done the impossible. They have successfully "built" a beating heart in the lab, an organ potentially suitable for autologous transplants, at least for rats and pigs in whom the research was conducted.
Video: Researchers create a new heart in the lab
Rat organs can be stripped of their cells and regrown to pump blood.
Rat hearts, stripped of their cells by detergents, have been used as a scaffold to engineer a bioartificial heart, which can amazingly pump a little like the original organ.
With further development, the method may one day be used to repair heart damage or even generate new hearts for transplantation. Cell-free hearts from pigs, for example, could serve as scaffolding to grow a heart with human cells, researchers say, because pig hearts are of a similar size and complexity to human hearts.
clipped from www.nature.com
