Heart tissue grown in lab

Fiona Macrae

March 11, 2007 12:00am

Article from: Sunday Herald Sun

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A TINY beating "heart in a dish" has been grown by scientists in a world first that will offer hope to millions of cardiac patients.

Such laboratory-reared tissue could one day be used to repair heart attack damage.

It could also cut the need for transplants and, if used to test drugs, reduce the risk of dangerous side-effects when new medicines are introduced to patients.

Researcher Lior Gepstein, a cardiologist, said: "This could have a huge impact. Heart failure is a huge problem. It is responsible for more hospitalisation than all forms of cancer combined."

The Israeli research team used human embryonic stem cells, blank cells with the ability to turn into specialised tissue types.

Crucially, they found a way of persuading the different types of cell that form the heart to grow and work together.

The result was a tiny piece of heart muscle less than one centimetre square, but threaded with minute blood vessels to closely resemble the complex tissue of the human heart.

It has a beat, continually contracting and relaxing in the same way as heart muscle.

The researchers hope to refine the technique to create sections big enough to take the place of muscle scarred by heart attack.

The ultimate hope is to reduce the need for transplants, presently the last hope for many.

Fellow researcher Dr Shulamit Levenberg, a biomedical engineer, said: "If we could sew a large enough piece of tissue on to a human heart to maintain a good circulation, there would probably be no need for many transplants."

However, it is unlikely that the tissue would replace the need for transplants altogether because the researchers are decades away from growing an entire heart.

The first human trials using sections of grown tissue could start within 10 years.

Their creation is now being grafted on to rats' hearts to find out how well it fuses with natural tissue.

So far, the scientists have managed only to make a few million cells, a fraction of the billion or so needed to repair the damage done by a severe heart attack.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,21358289-24331,00.html