Hybrid hearts could solve transplant shortage

New Scientist ^ | June 03 2009 | Andy Coghlan

[grey_whiskers]

"IT'S amazing, absolutely beautiful," says Doris Taylor, describing the latest addition to an array of tiny thumping hearts that sit in her lab, hooked up to an artificial blood supply.

The rat hearts beat just as if there were inside a live animal, but even more remarkable is how each one has been made: by coating the stripped-down "scaffolding" of one rat's heart with tissue grown from another rat's stem cells.

Taylor, a stem cell scientist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, now wants to repeat the achievement on a much larger scale, by "decellularising" hearts, livers and other organs taken either from human cadavers or from larger animals such as pigs, and coating them in stem cells harvested from people.

[grey_whiskers]

See also

and

As Michael Ledeen might say of the Middle East, "Faster, please."

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

Like, *PING*, folks.

[Argus]

ObamaCare will put a stop to this sort of thing.

[MHGinTN]

Lends new meaning to ‘organ harvesting’ don’tchaknow.

[mamelukesabre]

The article says they can’t make it work properly. They can only make it look like the proper organ.

[grey_whiskers]

That's what I meant by "faster, please."

Cheers!

[neverdem]

thanks, bfl

[neverdem]

regenerative medicine ping - think of scaffold cultures not tissue cultures, but how did they supply the blood?

[Dr. Scarpetta]

BTTT

[sitetest]

Wow.