Medical researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have successfully used stem cells to grow functioning heart tissue, a major step toward bioengineering organs for people in need of a transplant. Growing organs from a patient's own genetic material could potentially eliminate the need for a donor and reduce the risk of the patient's immune system rejecting the transplanted organ.

A technique using messenger RNA was used to revert skin cells to stem cells. Those stem cells, which have the capacity to grow into any type of cell in the human body, were then stimulated to grow into cardiac muscle tissue. The growing heart was then placed inside a bioreactor to simulate conditions inside the human body, and the cardiac muscle tissue responded normally to electrical stimulation as it continued to grow.

Growing an entire heart from stem cells is a bit trickier than that, however, as a structural scaffold called an extracellular matrix is required to support the tissue cells and give the organ its shape. The scaffold is naturally created from proteins that are secreted from specialized cardiac cells. But this requires "a supportive environment [inside the body] in which cells can repopulate the scaffold to form mature tissue capable of handling complex cardiac functions," Jacques Guyette, a research fellow at MGH, said in a press release.

To get around this challenge, the researchers used the existing scaffold structure from 73 donor hearts that were determined unsuitable for transplantation. A detergent solution was used to strip the hearts of their living cells, leaving behind only the extracellular matrix. The new living tissue could then be grown around the neutral scaffolding from the donor hearts.

Though growing an entire human heart in a lab is still some time away, MGH's research might be used in the near future to help people with heart conditions. The techniques developed by the team could be used to regenerate tissue in damaged hearts so that the patient doesn't need a full transplant.

"Regenerating a whole heart is most certainly a long-term goal that is several years away, so we are currently working on engineering a functional myocardial patch that could replace cardiac tissue damaged due a heart attack or heart failure," says Guyette.

A paper detailing the research was recently published in the journal Circulation Research.

Source: Massachusetts General Hospital via CNET

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