2008-01-17

Beating Heart Created In the Lab

clipped from www.medgadget.com

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

clipped from www.nature.com

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.

A rat heart (top) turns ghostly pale when stripped of cells (bottom).

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Related:
Researchers Create Beating Heart In Lab - Medgadget - www.medgadget.com
Ghost heart has a tiny beat : Nature News
U of M Researchers Create Beating Heart in Laboratory - Academic Health Center, University of Minnesota
Access : Cells mend damaged mouse hearts : Nature News