There are thousands of people waiting for heart transplants around the world. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough organs available to meet demand and a significant proportion of those patients will never find a suitable donor organ. Of the patients that do find an organ, it may not always result in a successful transplant because many organs are rejected by the immune system.
New research from the United States may have the answer — creating human hearts from stem cells. The technique developed by scientists is attempting to grow a full sized human heart from the patient’s own stem cells. This could solve both organ availability and transplant rejection problems. Because the organ has been developed from the patient’s cells it can’t be rejected by the immune system.
The innovative technique for creating human hearts from stem cells is being developed by Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. The latest breakthrough involves using reprogrammed adult skin cells to create human heart tissue. Details have just been published in the journal Circulation Research.
Because organs have a certain shape and structure, scientists must develop a scaffold. They then add stem cells to the scaffold, which builds tissue. For this research, scientists used real human hearts to provide that scaffold. They stripped most cells from donor hearts that were in very poor condition and unfit for transplantation. They then encouraged stem cells to build new healthy tissue on top of the heart scaffolds.
Using a real scaffold made it much simple to create human hearts from stem cells. The stem cells used in the procedure came from the patient’s skin. The skin cells are first turned into induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSCs), which are then turned into two types of cardiac cells before being placed on the heart.
The cells were fed with an infusion of nutrients for two weeks and began to cover the heart scaffolds. Scientists then used an electric shock to stimulate the hearts — and most began beating. This is the closest that scientists have come to creating a heart that is ready for transplantation. It is great news for the thousands of patients around the world who require a heart transplant.
Source: Scientists Grow Full-Sized, Beating Human Hearts from Stem Cells
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