Researchers create beating rat heart using cells of young rats

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have grown a new beating animal heart using transplanted cells from young, healthy rats in the laboratory. Considering the increasing number of people requiring heart transplants and the low availability of the vital organ, the research has just kindled new hopes of creating, what the scientists call, bio-artificial organs in humans.

According to experts, some 100 million people around the world suffer heart ailments and many of them die because of a shortage of donor hearts, which are gathered from dying people and given anti-rejection drug therapy before transplanting them into a new body.

Doctors may one day be able to use stem cells to restructure hearts for transplantation, using organs from dead body as an underlying structure, researchers from the University of Minnesota said.

“The heart is just a beautiful, elegant organ, and it would be very difficult to recreate it,” said Doris Taylor, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Cardiovascular Repair and the lead investigator in an interview. “We started thinking, ‘Wouldn't it be cool if we could just take the cells out and put new cells in?’”

Taylor and colleagues decellularized the hearts of dead rats while leaving the basic collagen structure intact. They injected this white protein matrix with heart cells from newborn rats, fed them a nutrient-rich solution and left them in the lab to grow. Within eight days, pumping action of the heart was noted.

Cadaver hearts may some day be used as the scaffold upon which new cells can grow into an organ to be transplanted into a heart-failure patient. In place of neonatal cells, the matrix would be filled with stem cells of the patients' own body, which would help abolish the need for immune-suppressing drugs that are used when transplanted organs come from other people, Taylor said.

Also, she added that the same technique might be applied to lungs, livers, kidneys, and muscles. Even pancreases might be grown this way, perhaps helping people who suffer from type 1 diabetes.

“We're not there yet, but we're very excited about the possibility of helping millions of people with chronic disease,” Taylor said.