By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist

American scientists have successfully created a human heart out of adult stem cells that could one day spare transplant patients a long and uncertain wait for a donor.

LifeNews.com is reporting that Dr. Doris Taylor of the University of Minnesota presented her team’s latest work at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology over the weekend. The research involved taking a human heart from a cadaver and removing all the cells with a detergent solution until all that was left was the tough protein skeleton of the organ – known as a “ghost heart.”

Researchers then added adult stem cells from human patients, which bonded to the skeleton and began to form cardiac cells, essentially growing heart muscle within a lab bioreactor.

“The hearts are growing and we hope they will show signs of beating within the next week,” said Doris Taylor, a specialist in regenerative medicine at the University of Minnesota. “There are many hurdles to overcome to generate a fully functional heart, but the hope is that it may one day be possible to grow entire organs for transplant.”

Dr. Taylor’s team has previously taken the “ghost hearts” of rats and pigs and applied human stem cells, which not only multiplied and began to form into heart muscle, but eventually began to beat independently. Even though the beating strength was only about 25 percent of that of a normal heart, the fact that the hearts beat at all was seen as a triumph.

Scientists say the process may be used one day to grow hearts from a patient’s own cells, thus avoiding the potential for rejection, but this is decades away.

Similar methods have been used to grow and transplant new windpipes in patients and adult stem cells have been used successfully to treat and even reverse heart damage.

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