Scientists in the United States have been successful in making a real beating heart in the laboratory for the first time. It was made possible by using heart tissue from dead rats and pigs. Scientists created a working framework and seeded this it with the live cells.

The miracle innovation was concluded by the scientists at the University of Minnesota. This research now has been published in the online issue of the “Nature Medicine” on January 13th.

“Whole Organ Decellularization (WOD) “process was adopted by the researchers, in which all the cells of a heart are removed, leaving only the ‘extracellular matrix’ or the ‘scaffolding’ between the cells. These cells actually form a physical framework.

Dr Doris Taylor, the lead researcher at the ‘University of Minnesota’ said,
“The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells”.

Every year, millions of people across the world are diagnosed with heart failure. There is an acute shortage of donors worldwide. This situation causes millions of deaths every year. Until now, it was just a theoretical concept to provide a “Bioartificial” heart, or replacing part of a diseased heart with a working component grown in the lab to the patients. This discovery has turned the theory in to real practice now.

Prior to this development, scientists were able to generate only heart tissue in the laboratories. Creating a three-dimensional scaffold imitating the complex architecture had been almost a mystery, says Dr Doris Taylor.

Growing of ‘Bioartificial Heart’ in the laboratory involved three major steps including engineering the architecture of the organ, making and mimicking the cell composition, and activating the pumping action.

Researchers first “cleaned” the cells off the hearts of dead rats and pigs with detergents. It is ‘Decellularization’ by which they removed everything leaving only the ‘extracellular matrix’. This process facilitated the scientists with enough scaffolding parts including the blood vessels, valves, and heart chambers. With these organs they created a framework of the heart.

To mimic the heart cells, scientists then reseeded the framework with progenitor cardiac and endothelial cells from newborn rat hearts and put it in a sterile environment to grow. Eight numbers of such constructs were kept in a bioreactor for a period of 28 days. This process simulated heart physiology.

Four days later, some contractions were observed. After 8 days, scientists observed that the hearts were pumping using physiological load and electrical stimulation. Rate of this pumping was around 2 per cent of adult strength, or around 25 per cent of the strength of a 16 week fetus.

Researchers are very much optimistic about this discovery. They trust it will further help to increase availability of donor organs. Dr. Taylor explained that with this is the first step to showing it was possible to create a working heart in three dimensions. The next goal researchers say would be to “use a patient’s stem cells to build a new heart”.

“It opens a door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas, you name it and we hope we can make it,” said Dr.Taylor.

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