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Researchers Create Beating Heart In Lab
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."
Tin Man will be so pleased.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
With the advances in biotechnology, it's amusing to think that Larry Niven in his Gil "The Arm" Hamilton stories (collected in Flatlander ) foresaw a future where you'd get the death penalty for just about anything just so that the state could rip out your organs for donation into someone needing it. In Niven's future history, the use of organ transplants ends only hundreds of years in the future when alloplasty ("gadgets instead of organs") is developed. Now, in just 2007, we're getting close to synthesizing real organs instead of transplanting or making little machines.
This presents a long-term opportunity for the next phase in body modification. Who says that a "replacement" organ must be identical to the original equipment? Perhaps athletes will opt for an enlarged six-chambered heart or an abdominal booster-heart to improve endurance.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Now the big question is, do I go for the replacement legs that give me more speed and let me jump higher, or do I become more stealthy. Choices, choices...
If you can grow replacement hears, then you can grow more than one.
Think of the gains of installing 2 in parallel, or even 4.
Though it would probably be nice to get their beating synchronized.
...it's pronounced "Fronkensteen".
...Of Your Heart.
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Well, Goodness Gracious Me!
Next up on OldTyme Radio overnight, Dr. Hanny Lector and the Cannibals with their top hit, Liver & Chianti. Hope you like it...
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?
if i read the article and the similar one on the BBC correctly then there was a shell of a heart they laced with stem cells that regrew into a heart functionality- but after 8 days operating at 2% so longer growth term is needed to by functional. this would go part way to solving rejection issue obviously, but if i am correct there is one slight problem you cannot take the patients heart, decellularize it and regrow it with stem cells because (1) bad as he heart is he needs it and (2) you still need to manufacture stem cells in sufficient quantity.
so there are a few options I see...
1. one use a dead donor heart as a shell and recellularize (that cannot be the correct term) with the patients stem cells assuming you can get them while he survives on what is left of his old heart and then transplant and hope there is no rejection
2. transplant the patient with an artificial heart until his old one can be repaired in the lab
3. find some way to create a fake heart "shell"? maybe extract some tissue from his current heart but not enough to kill him and create a template that the stem cells can be used to grow him a new heart over a few months.
of course they still need to manufacture a sufficient source of patient stem cells. does this sound reasonable?
of course in the UK, we have just got a new source of donors... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7186007.stm our prime minister has just decided to add the entire country onto the donor list unless we explicitly opt out. Gill the Arm would be amused...
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.
Given that another project also underway is "writing" synthetic organs using a rapid prototyping system (3D plotter) loaded with live cells, structural proteins, and growth factors, the salvaged-and-decellularlized organ should be rendered unnecessary in short order.
The fact that a substrate with the right chemical markers can be repopulated into a working organ means the process can proceed in two steps. This may make it easier to accomplish - especially by reducing the need for functioning blood-supply plumbing to provide nutrition and oxygenation in the eary stages of construction.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I mean, really. The stinkin' rich will have their hearts replicated and grown one after another just in case, while you and me will just drop down, carried to a hospital, and die. Somehow that's *not* the future I was thinking of when I was young. The bits and pieces (hah!) are there meanwhile, but our society isn't there at all.
A friend of mine was working in a hospital when some old and ill VIP had a heart failure and he not only got a replacement right away (while others died waiting for a replacement for months), no, he also got a second heart when the first one was rejected by his immune system within a day. Well, he died anyway from unrelated causes soon after, but I can't get over the vision of two otherwise perfectly healthy normal guys dying just because two hearts were *wasted* this way. I want to vomit each time I have to think of that event.
...for my ex-girlfriend?
I don't think she ever had one.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
And I seriously don't think the US government has held back research on stem cells. They just don't pay for it.
Unfortunately, they also consider that, if they ever spent any money on the construction or operation of the facility, they've "paid for it" sufficiently that no stem cell research can be done there. That eliminates virtually all medical research facilities - certainly all of 'em that are attached to universites and medical schools.
(Now if it were up to me the enforcement of that would consist of charging a higher overhead rate - calculated to replace the federal contribution to facility construction and operation under normal accounting principles - to any project that came under the federal ban. But it's not up to me. And the obvious intent of congress was to do their best to ban the research, rather than just pull federal funds.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way