WASHINGTON — Researchers seeking new treatments for heart disease managed to grow a rat heart in the lab and start it beating.
The next step is to take a pig heart, remove the cells and repopulate the gelatin-like matrix that’s left behind with cells from a pig to see if it will work in the larger heart.
Many efforts at growing body parts have focused on heart valves as an alternative to plastic or animal valves that wear out after being implanted in humans.
Dr. Doris Taylor, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota, led the team whose research appeared in Sunday’s online edition of the journal Nature Medicine.
An estimated 5 million people live with heart failure and about 550,000 new cases are diagnosed each year in the U.S. Approximately 50,000 die annually waiting for a heart donor.
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