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Grow Your Own Heart Valves

Posted by samzenpus on from the congen-circulatory-sphincters dept.

jcr writes "Medical researchers in Britain have succeeded in growing a heart valve from adult stem cells taken from bone marrow. The research is being reported in the journal of the Royal Society today. Growing a heart value from your own cells means that tissue rejection isn't an issue."

2 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. Tissue Rejection Not an Issue by slughead · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Tissue rejection isn't an issue with heart valves (one of the few tissues where it's not a problem).

    The problem with heart valves is that if you replace one with, say, a pig valve, it won't grow. For adults, this is not a problem, but for kids, it means they'll have to have a replacement in a few years as their heart literally grows out of the valve(s).

    This new grow-your-own approach would probably be best for children. For adults, however, heart valve replacement is actually fairly routine and requires no anti-rejection drugs afterwards.

    --
    Latewire
  2. Re:php by Retric · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So, ignoring the fact that a strong push into embryonic stem cell research would have resulted in zero additional baby deaths you assuming we would be in the same place today? Ethics aside we are probably in a worse place today than we would be without embryonic stem cell research. Over time millions of people may die because we are just a little behind where we could be. However, we will never know what could have been...

    Thanks.

    PS: The point of research is to find out how to do things. It was unlikely we would ever use embrionic stem cells as "standard" treatment but we could have learned a lot about how cells work much sooner.