Dead Hearth Comes To Life Again Thanks To Scientists
In a landmark breakthrough in the field of bio-technology or bio-medicine, scientists have been able to bring life to a death hearth, albeit that of a rat.
According to Nature Medicine the premiere journal of biomedical research, scientists at the University of Minnesota stripped a dead heart of all its cells using detergents and left only the scaffold made up of connective fibres and tissues. Then they injected the decellularised scaffold with 50-70 million living cells from newborn rats allowing them to grow on the scaffold. The new cells grew on the scaffold and the heart began to contract in four days time. The heart begun to show pumping activity in eight days.
This scientific breakthrough has opened unlimited opportunity for scientists to perfect the technique and try to apply it on human heart. It has been revealed that scientists have also tried this decellularization technique on other organs such as liver, lung, kidney and the pig hearth which is more closer to human hearth in size and complexity.
But scientists caution that it is still miles to go before human organs can be made through this technique. The organs have not yet been used for on animals for practical demonstration of how they work.
“We need to see what happens when these artificial hearts are placed in a recipient animal” said Anita Thomas, a scientist at the Australian Institute of Bio-engineering andNanotechnology, University of Queensland.
One obvious hurdle is the number of living cells required for seeding the scaffold under the technique. In this case, living cells from 100 rats have been used and naturally, the question arises from where would these cells be found in case of seeding a dead human organ to bring it to life. Stem Cells are the likeliest solution as they can turn into any type of cells in the body. Scientists hope that solutions can be found in the near future and these bioartificial organs can be alternative to organ transplantation procedures. According to estimates, around 22 million people suffer from heart failure every year.