The need for heart transplants will always exceed the number of donor hearts available for transplant. Thanks to research just out from Massachusetts General Hospital, though, this may not continue to be a problem for much longer. Researchers there have just succeeded in growing fully contractile heart tissue by recellularizing a collagen scaffold, and they’re hoping to refine the method so that it can be used as a “functional myocardial patch” for cardiac injuries.
For this particular study, the team used mRNA to convince skin cells to step backwards, reprogramming them first into pluripotent stem cells and then into cardiac muscle cells in culture. (Remember when we didn’t even know if we *could* reprogram cells into stem cells and not just have that create turbo-cancer?) Then they carefully seeded about half a billion of the new cardiomyocytes into the left ventricular wall of decellularized hearts. After incubating for two weeks, the researchers found immature but contractile heart muscle. Not just disparate cells stuck to bits of collagen. Electrically responsive heart tissue.
It’s not a whole, functioning human heart, but the researchers aren’t daunted; they didn’t set out to build a whole heart. “Regenerating a whole heart is most certainly a long-term goal that is several years away, so we are currently working on engineering a functional myocardial patch that could replace cardiac tissue damaged due a heart attack or heart failure,” said Jacques Guyette, PhD, lead author of the report. “Among the next steps that we are pursuing are improving methods to generate even more cardiac cells – recellularizing a whole heart would take tens of billions – optimizing bioreactor-based culture techniques to improve the maturation and function of engineered cardiac tissue, and electronically integrating regenerated tissue to function within the recipient’s heart.”
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/224704-functional-human-heart-tissue-grown-from-skin-cells