They created a beating heart in a laboratory

Medical Nilgun Salim
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Researchers are getting closer to creating a synthetic heart in a laboratory.

In Europe, nearly 3.600 people are on waiting lists hoping to receive a heart transplant as soon as possible.

The lucky ones, who eventually receive the transplant are baffled by the risk of the body rejecting the new heart.

To combat the organ shortage and to eliminate the chances that the patient’s body will reject the transplanted organ, researchers are trying to create synthetic organs using cells from the patient.

A team of researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical College was able to use adult skin cells to create functional human heart tissue, according to the study published in the Circulation Research.

Although more research is needed, the scientists are hoping to create functional hearts.

Giving the fact that each and every human being has a particular ‘design’, it is much easier to create the organs in the laboratory using a template.

In the past, the researchers developed a cleaning technique able to eliminate cells that could be activated immune system using a compound from a cleaning substance.

The experiment was conducted on rats, while the current study was conducted on a human heart.

They managed to remove the cells from 73 donated hearts that were labeled as incompatible organs. In the next step, the researchers used human skin transformed into pluripotent stem cells. Afterward, they transformed the pluripotent stem cells into two different types of heart cells.

Once the experts were sure that the rest of the matrix is strong enough to support the new cells, they placed the induced cells.

For two weeks they infused the heart with a nutrient solution which allowed it to grow like the heart in the human body.

After two weeks, the heart tissue looked similar to a premature heart. The best part of the experiment was when the experts gave a jolt of electricity and the organ began to beat.

Although this is not the first time researchers created a cardiac tissue in the laboratory this result is the most successful so far.