Scientists Develop Fully Beating Human Heart Using Stem Cell Technology
5Will the new heart work?
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The question is will the new heart work? Researchers have said that they were able to grow hearts through the introduction of electricity induced in it. The new heart technology is still in research and testing stages the researchers revealed and it will be some time till it can be made available for use.
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6The new technology will make up for heart shortages
The new technology seeks to address the problem of shortage of organs which is why the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School have teamed up together to develop new organs from stem cell technology starting with hearts. The adult skin cells are being used to regenerate into human heart tissue that is fully functional. The study was subsequently published in the journal Circulation Research.
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7The new technology has huge potential for success
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In an ideal situation, scientists should be able to grow hearts from a patient’s tissue using a scaffold which is like building a house. But they are still not entirely successful as yet. Earlier, they would take a donor organ and strip the cells from it using a detergent solution. On the new study, they stripped away cells from almost 73 donor hearts that were declared unfit for transplantation. Then using the stem cell transformation technique they developed two different types of cardiac cells.
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8Hope for success
Once the remaining matrix was proved strong enough for becoming a foundation for new cells, the researchers then inserted the induced cells into them. Once the heart cells were developed in two weeks, they found that the hearts contained tissue that was well structured and looked like immature hearts. When those were given an electrical shock, it started beating. This astonished the researchers and gave them hope of success.
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