Scientists Create Beating Hearts in Lab

[Hissyspit]

Source: Reuters

Scientists create beating hearts in lab
By Julie Steenhuysen
Sun Jan 13, 2:41 PM ET

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. researchers say they have coaxed hearts from dead rats to beat again in the laboratory and said the discovery may one day lead to customized organ transplants for people.

"The hope would be we could generate an organ that matched your body," said Doris Taylor of the University of Minnesota Center for Cardiovascular Repair.

Her study, which appeared on Sunday in the journal Nature Medicine, offers a way to fulfill the promise of using stem cells -- the body's master cells -- to grow tailor-made organs for transplant.

Taylor and colleagues used a process called decellularization to wash away existing cells from the hearts of dead rats while leaving the basic collagen structure intact. They injected this gelatin-like scaffold with heart cells from newborn rats, fed them a nutrient-rich solution and left them in the lab to grow. Four days later, the hearts started to contract.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080113/sc_nm/heart_artificial_dc

[mike_c]

1. very cool....

Although too many quips about Reanimator come to mind....

[Hissyspit]

2. or just Mary Shelley's work. n/t

[Wednesdays]

5. It's alive! Alive!!

[leQ]

16. you took the words right out of my mouth. (eom)

[KittyWampus]

3. so much of modern science is just going further down the rabbit hole.

[Teaser]

4. the rabbit hole rocks

and this is awesome.

[supernova]

11. Why would you say that?`

This is a good development.

[NickB79]

13. What's above the rabbit hole?

Famine, pestilence, and suffering?

[Jane Austin]

6. I swear I read that and tried hard to understand why a dog would need

more hearts.

And I didn't even have that Margarita at Serrano's!

[FloridaJudy]

7. Dead rat hearts beat again?

The inevitable quip about Dick Cheney rears its head.

[Hulk]

8. Hot damn!! cheney has hope!!

[nikto]

12. Perhaps...

...There is now hope for 50-Million
heartless Republicans!

(Just like The Tin Man!)

The only question that remains:

Can these hearts be transplanted safely into LIZARDS?

If so, open your chests up wide, GOP!

[Lone_Star_Dem]

9. Team Creates Rat Heart Using Cells of Baby Rats

Source: NYT

Medicine’s dream of growing new human hearts and other organs to repair or replace damaged ones received a significant boost Sunday when University of Minnesota researchers reported success in creating a beating rat heart in a laboratory.

Experts not involved in the Minnesota work called it “a landmark achievement” and “a stunning” advance. But they and the Minnesota researchers cautioned that the dream, if it is ever realized, was still at least 10 years away.

Dr. Doris A. Taylor, the head of the team that created the rat heart, said she followed a guiding principle of her laboratory: “give nature the tools, and get out of the way.”

“We just took nature’s own building blocks to build a new organ,” Dr. Taylor said of her team’s report in the journal Nature Medicine.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/14/health/14heart.html?ex=1357966800&en=848d760c85f53c9b&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

[supernova]

10. This is wonderful news to those of us

with cardiac conditions that might require surgical intervention, as well as transplantation.

What's available now are only temporarily solutions and full heart transplants are way too rare.

:applause: :applause:

[UndertheOcean]

14. wow

Wonder if this becomes mainstream before any of us dies from a heart condition.

The nightmare would be for one to die , then the procedure that would have saved his life be viable just a few months later

[Javaman]

15. Now only if the could create a brain, they could then give it to moron*. nt

[bitchkitty]

17. WOW

I could really, really use a new liver!

[LeftHander]

18. Cheney 2.0 beta is going smoothly....

The heart was the big flaw in Cheney 1.9

[KansDem]

19. Good news for this heart attack survivor! Now, just keep the Talibornagains away!

No need to involve the Talibornagains in this development. I don't them mucking up the works!