Doctors mend broken hearts
Doctors' creation of the first living artificial heart could mean an end to organ shortages for transplant operations
Monday January 14 2008
Doctors have created the first living artificial heart in a development that could herald the end of organ shortages.
In an unprecedented feat, researchers "refurbished'' a dead heart so that it can beat again.
The breakthrough could overcome the shortage of replacement hearts and other organs and do away with the need for anti-rejection drugs, according to an American team.
Ultimately, scientists hope to use patients' own stem cells to manufacture new hearts.
The "bioartificial heart'', which is described in the journal 'Nature Medicine' by University of Minnesota researchers, could pave the way to a treatment for 22 million people worldwide who live with heart failure.
The team took a whole heart from a rat and removed cells from it. Then, with the resulting architecture, chambers, valves and the blood vessels intact, re-populated the structure with stem cells.
After four days, contractions were observed and by day eight the cells had grown a pumping heart-like organ.
"We just took nature's own building blocks to build a new organ,'' says Dr Harald Ott, a co-investigator on the project.
"When we saw the first contractions we were speechless.''
The work has huge implications: "The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells,'' said Prof Doris Taylor, director of the Centre for Cardiovascular Repair, Minnesota.
The method could be used to grow liver, kidney, lung and pancreas, indeed "virtually any organ with a blood supply.''
She said that although "years away'' from use in hospitals, she is ready to grow a human heart, though the cost is prohibitive.
In general, the supply of donor organs is limited and once a heart is transplanted, individuals face life-long difficulties, often trading heart failure for high medication, high blood pressure, diabetes, and kidney failure.
However, a heart created by this new method is less likely to be rejected by the body. (© Daily Telegraph, London)
- Roger Highfield in London
