Bioartificial Hearts News

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Here’s a relevant excerpt from The Independent (link) that you all may find interesting:

Surgeons crossed another medical frontier this week with the transplant of a windpipe grown from stem cells – the “mother” cells of the body capable of developing into specialised tissue. The success of the operation in Barcelona on Claudia Castillo, a 30-year-old mother-of-two, proved what scientists have long promised – that stem cells can now be used to fashion replacement body parts.

The success of the medical procedure has opened the door to other possible breakthroughs in regenerative medicine – which is when damaged body parts are repaired in situ rather than being removed and replaced by whole organ transplants. Medical scientists believe that few body parts will be left untouched by the technical, genetic and surgical breakthroughs that could revolutionise medicine in the 21st century.

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From Telegraph.co.uk:

The science of healing is developing so quickly that it has become almost a cliché to describe a particular operation as a “breakthrough”. Yet there is no doubt that the first successful transplant of a human windpipe, constructed partly from stem cells, is an astonishing milestone – one that could indeed mark the start of a new era in medicine.

At long last, the glint in a researcher’s eye has been turned into a significant advance in the clinic. Forget all the fuss about embryos and angst about playing God: this is unadulterated good news. We have proved that scientists can now fashion organs using a patient’s own cells, eliminating the problems with rejection that have always plagued transplants. Today it is a trachea – tomorrow it could be a colon, even a heart.

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From ScienceFriday.com (hear the full mp3 discussion here):

Is it possible to mend a broken heart? Researchers writing in the journal Nature Medicine this week report that they’ve been able to build a beating rat heart in the lab. It’s not entirely artificial, however. The researchers used detergent solutions to wash away cells from an existing heart, leaving behind the noncellular ‘matrix’ material that forms a scaffolding for the heart tissue. They then inserted a mixture of fresh cells into that bare scaffolding, and the cells repopulated that framework to form a beating heart. The new heart is weaker than an ordinary heart, but the researchers hope that the technique could one day be used to help grow replacement organs for patients needing heart transplants. We’ll talk with one of the scientists on the project about how it works and the road ahead for the technique.

From Telegraph.co.uk:

Breakthrough which marks the creation of the first living artificial heart could signal the beginning of the end of organ shortages, reports Roger Highfield

Doctors have stripped down and refurbished a dead heart so that it can beat again, an unprecedented feat that could signal the beginning of the end of organ shortages..

• How to grow a heart
• Organs to be taken without consent
• Bishop speaks out against Brown’s
  organ donation plan

The revolutionary research could overcome the shortage of replacement hearts and other organs, and do away with the need for antirejection drugs, according to an American team.

The world’s first beating, retooled “bioartificial heart” is described today in the journal Nature Medicine by University of Minnesota researchers in research that could pave the way to a new treatment for the 22 million people worldwide who live with heart failure.

The team took a whole heart and removed cells from it. Then, with the resulting architecture, chambers, valves and the blood vessel structure intact, repopulated the structure with new cells.

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