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Researchers Create Beating Heart In Lab

Posted by kdawson on from the keeps-on-ticking dept.

Sunday Scientist writes "Minnesota researchers have created a beating heart in the laboratory. In a process called whole organ decellularization, they grew functioning heart tissue by using dead rat and pig hearts as a sort of flesh matrix, and reseeding them with a mixture of live cells. The goal is to grow replacement parts, using their own stem cells, for people born with defective tickers or experiencing heart failure."

1 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. Not quite creating. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    If I'm reading this right, they didn't so much create a new heart as bring a dead one back to life.

    Which is possibly even cooler, and I'm sure you can find 50k hearts a year in the US that wouldn't normally be donatable because of time constraints. (A heart is (normally!) only good for 4 hours after death or removal iirc). And even beyond saved lives, we can hopefully get a better quality of life too, since there should be less time waiting for a transplant with a half dead body.

    Hmm, do modern artificial hearts last 8 days reliably? And would a diseased heart be practical?

    What about organ rejection issues, will those be causes by the dead heart, the stem cells, both?