Eshan Maitra
No more implants! Soon scientists will be growing functional human heart in their labs. Only last year first successful heart implantation was possible. Then more researchers became interested in culturing hearts in the lab. HaraldOtt led this brilliant team from Massachusetts General Hospital Centre for Regenerative Medicine, to shape the first functioning human heart in the special tissue culturing process. They ran researches on 73 hearts before mastering the method.
Organ implantations are very risky. Almost vital both to the donor and recipient. Especially, singular organs are hardly possible to come by in general implantable healthy condition. Even if the parts are found at the right time, it takes huge dosses ofpowerful drugs to suppress the anti-mechanism of the recipient’s body to accept a new body part.
But this newly process of creating bio-engineered heart is created with the cells of the recipient. That can drastically reduce the risk. Though, a donor is still required. But the process is specially designed for decellularised organ. Means, a perfect healthy heart is not required. Later, recipient’s pluripotent stem cells are induced into the structure. Then the patchwork is cultured in a controlled environment, until the heart is fully functioning as a whole.
HaraldOttsaid, though they are far from creating a structure for heart on their own in the lab and only from scratch. Still, it is considered to be a great achievement in the fieldof bio-engineering. It may also reduce the cost of heart treatment and save many lives. Jacques Guyette of the researcher team also mentioned, they are currently working on replacing the damaged cardiac tissue of a heart patient with engineeredmyocardial patch. That could eventually become a part of the initial heart tissue.