A soft robotic heart which would end the need for donor transplants, could be available within a decade, after scientists set out plans to build a hybrid organ from stem cells and biotech.

The cyber-heart has been shortlisted for £30 million in funding from the British Heart Foundation (BHF) for ‘radical new approaches’ to curing major heart conditions.

It is the brainchild of a team of Dutch scientists who are hoping it will solve the organ shortage crisis.

Lead researcher Professor Jolanda Kluin, of Amsterdam University Medical Centre (UMC), said she was inspired after seeing a robot starfish, with soft supple limbs that could expand and contract like heart muscle.

“There is a need for radical new solution,” she told a briefing in London to announce the shortlist.

“We’re decades away from building a living heart from a patient’s own cells, if we will ever be able to do it, but some three years ago I saw a picture in a Dutch newspaper, a picture of a soft robotic starfish, and it could move and swim like a living starfish.

“Suddenly I saw the potential for merging the benefits of biology with power of soft robotics, for a hybrid heart, the first ever solution for end stage heart failure. Soft robotic artificial cardiac muscles precisely mimic the human heart, so the hybrid heart really beats like a real heart. And it is lined by the patient's own cells preventing clotting, infection and reaction.