Beating Human Hearts From Stem Cells
Scientists Grow Full-Sized, Beating Human Hearts From Stem Cells It’s the closest we've come to growing transplantable hearts in the lab. IMAGE description : Regenerated heart - Heart tissue, seeded with induced cardiac cells, matures in a bioreactor that the researchers createdBernhard Jank, MD, Ott Lab, Center for Regenerative Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital via Eurekalert Of the 4,000 Americans waiting for heart transplants, only 2,500 will receive new hearts in the next year. Even for those lucky enough to get a transplant, the biggest risk is the their bodies will reject the new heart and launch a massive immune reaction against the foreign cells. To combat the problems of organ shortage and decrease the chance that a patient's body will reject it, researchers have been working to create synthetic organs from patients' own cells. Now a team of scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School has gotten one step closer, us...