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Researchers create beating heart in lab
University of Minnesota researchers have created a beating heart in the laboratory.
By using a process called whole organ decellularization, scientists from the University of Minnesota Center for Cardiovascular Repair grew functioning heart tissue by taking dead rat and pig hearts and reseeding them with a mixture of live cells. The research will be published online in the January 13 issue of Nature Medicine.
“The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells,” said Doris Taylor, Ph.D., director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair, Medtronic Bakken professor of medicine and physiology, and principal investigator of the research.
Nearly 5 million people live with heart failure, and about 550,000 new cases are diagnosed each year in the United States. Approximately 50,000 United States patients die annually waiting for a donor heart.
While there have been advances in generating heart tissue in the lab, creating an entire 3-dimensional scaffold that mimics the complex cardiac architecture and intricacies, has always been a mystery, Taylor said.
It seems decellularization may be a solution – essentially using nature’s platform to create a bioartifical heart, she said.
Decellularization is the process of removing all of the cells from an organ – in this case an animal cadaver heart – leaving only the extracellular matrix, the framework between the cells, intact.
After successfully removing all of the cells from both rat and pig hearts, researchers injected them with a mixture of progenitor cells that came from neonatal or newborn rat hearts and placed the structure in a sterile setting in the lab to grow.
The results were very promising, Taylor said. Four days after seeding the decellularized heart scaffolds with the heart cells, contractions were observed. Eight days later, the hearts were pumping.
“Take a section of this ‘new heart’ and slice it, and cells are back in there,” Taylor said. “The cells have many of the markers we associate with the heart and seem to know how to behave like heart tissue.”
“We just took nature’s own building blocks to build a new organ,” said Harald C. Ott, M.D., co-investigator of the study and a former research associate in the center for cardiovascular repair, who now works at Massachusetts General Hospital. “When we saw the first contractions we were speechless.”
Researchers are optimistic this discovery could help increase the donor organ pool.
In general, the supply of donor organs is limited and once a heart is transplanted, individuals face life-long immunosuppression, often trading heart failure for high blood pressure, diabetes, and kidney failure, Taylor said.
Researchers hope that the decellularization process could be used to make new donor organs. Because a new heart could be filled with the recipient’s cells, researchers hypothesize it’s much less likely to be rejected by the body. And once placed in the recipient, in theory the heart would be nourished, regulated, and regenerated similar to the heart that it replaced.
“We used immature heart cells in this version, as a proof of concept. We pretty much figured heart cells in a heart matrix had to work,” Taylor said. “Going forward, our goal is to use a patient’s stem cells to build a new heart.”
Although heart repair was the first goal during research, decellularization shows promising potential to change how scientists think about engineering organs, Taylor said. “It opens a door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas – you name it and we hope we can make it,” she said.
Submitted by BJS on Sun, 2008-01-13 12:13.
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freak who likes turtles
I like turtles...in my soup
???
They kill pigs so we can eat. They should be able to kill pigs so we can live. seeing as living is greater than eating.
Freedom of press
This sounds good, for now. With time it will fade out of sight and of our memories just like digital eye enhancement (Unlike corrective laser surgery, with it you can see MILES down the road to read the STOP sign).
I am sure that some bureaucrat somewhere will delay it long enough till a lot of people can profit from it, and the general public will not be able to afford it.
But I am glad to read about such advances in R&D.
Rescuer
Awesome
Being able to swap out defective parts is a good thing. While this would undoubtedly extend human life statistics somewhat, as a person ages, the gradual increase in failures would eventually lead to a total collapse. At least in the near future. The primary impact would be to make our current lifespans more productive and enjoyable.
More Questions
Where can one access more information on this procedure?
I am concerned (along with LArs and DensityDuck) about longevity and the human cycle of death- sometimes it is time for someone to die.
However, in using this procedure, how will it change the need for immune system suppression for transplant? Also, in using a patient's own cells as the ground work, what about genetic pre-disposition for diseases, in any organs that they might reproduce? This might lessen the strain on donor programs for people that survived accidents but need new organs, or have non-gentically related diseases, but will they use human heart "scaffolds" for human heart growth? (which does not change much with the donor system unless the immune system thing is completely out of the picture.) Or would a pig heart or another animal heart really be adequate for the human system? And like the Jarvic heart, will it last long enough for it to be efficacious? I know it is human life versus money, but what about the quality of life post transplant with this new technology? How are the rats and pigs performing post new heart? I have a lot of questions, I am really curious about this development.
Now that would merit an asterisk
Putting together athletes with extra hearts and lungs... and suddenly Barry Bonds looks like a quaint throwback.
Put this together with the
Put this together with the recent news about the carbon-fiber-legs-guy, and I can imagine a posthuman future world where athletes have three hearts, six lungs, and high-tension springs for legs...
Mmmm...but is it kosher?
I wonder if u get a pigs heart is it kosher?, well apart from that nobody else thinks that we need to die sometime?, ok nobody wants a loved one to die Im the first one to admit it, but imagine if we lived to i dont know 200 it would be chaos, not enough food, not enough water, space to live on, money nothing would be enough I really like this kind of technology but is it what we need?.
plz do notice that i dont have any moral issues with this. ^^.
They don't kill the pig to
They don't kill the pig to get the heart. They use dead animal hearts, that way PETA can't complain.
So... they take a pig heart,
So... they take a pig heart, decellularize it, inject it with the patient's heart/stem cells, and voila, new human heart? Sounds pretty awesome. But even though there are ample pig's hearts, it sounds as though they need a heart in order to make a heart, right? No scaffolding, no heart? But that's the next goal, then.
Just summarizing for the sake of clarification.
single point of failure
What bothers me is that the human body has duplication for most functions except circulation. We have a brain that can withstand damage thanks to its many neurons, two hands, etc, but everything can fail from a single dysfunctional heart. Perhaps in the future when technology will allow it newborn will get a second semi-artificial heart by default in a standard medical operation after birth. As for the supply for donor organs, perhaps the problem is partially due to unavailability of information on the organ donation process. Perhaps there should be more exposure of the public to the idea of donating organs.
I Like Turtles
I Like Turtles
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