---...While there have been advances in generating living heart tissue in the lab, this is the first time an entire, three-dimension bio-artificial heart has been brought to life.
The core procedure making this possible is called decellularisation.
In this process, all the cells from an organ -- in this case the heart of a dead rat -- are stripped away using powerful detergents, leaving only a bleached-white scaffolding composed of proteins secreted by the cells.
In the experiments, this matrix was then injected with a mixture of cells taken from newborn rat hearts and placed in a sterile lab setting, where the scientists hoped it would grow.
After only four days, contractions started, and on the eighth day, the hearts were pumping, according to the study, published in the British journal Nature Medicine.
The researchers were stunned.
"When we saw the first contractions, we were speechless," said Harald Ott, a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital.
"We certainly were surprised that it worked so well and so quickly," Taylor told AFP. "There are so many places this could have gone wrong."
In humans the objective would be to inject stemcells drawn directly from the recipient of the donated organ, thus eliminating the danger that the new heart would be rejected by the immune system.
Recent breakthroughs in stemcell research from non-embryo sources mean that new tissues should be easy to generate, according to the authors. ---
excerpt from
http://www.physorg.com/news119445798.html
I see a bright future...
