The development is being hailed as a “stunning landmark achievement” by experts not involved in the Univ. of Minnesota breakthrough in which a beating heart of a rat was created by using healthy stem cells from baby rats.  By creating a “scaffold” (eliminating all of the cells of a dead rat’s heart) and using it to grow new cells, the team used “nature’s building blocks to build a new organ.”

With modifications, scientists should be able to grow a new human heart by taking stem cells from a patient’s bone marrow and placing them in a cadaver heart that’s been prepared as a scaffold, Dr. Taylor said in a telephone interview from her laboratory in Minneapolis. The early success “opens the door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas — you name it and we hope we can make it,” she said.

Even creating the scaffold took trial and error…in cleaing out the dead rat’s heart, Dr. Doris Taylor and her team used surfactants like those in shampoos into the rat’s arteries to wash out the heart cells and then injected neonatal cardiac cells…the first two “washes” failed…the thrid attempt worked, leaving a translucent scaffold that retained the heart’s architecture.

This process is called organ decellularization.

“Multiple things” must be done before a human trial can be attempted, Taylor said. “We are moving to larger organs, making sure we can get enough cells in to repopulate the entire heart, and also, if it is transplantable, to keep it alive for a long time,” she said.

The biotechnology might be able to bypass a major impediment to organ transplants, the need to use tissue that is compatible with a recipient’s immune system, Taylor said. “In theory, we could be able to use stem cells from a recipient’s body to regenerate a heart,” she said. “We could rebuild a heart that is immunologically similar to yours.”

We are on the door step of scientific discoveries that will challenge even today’s imagination.

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