This is flippin’ amazing!!! I know it is in its very beginning stages and it is just rats in the lab, but still… Researchers say they have brought dead hearts back to life. That is right, they began beating again right in the laboratory. This discovery may one day lead to customized organ transplants for people!!!
Taylor and colleagues used a process called decellularization to wash away existing cells from the hearts of dead rats while leaving the basic collagen structure intact. They injected this gelatin-like scaffold with heart cells from newborn rats, fed them a nutrient-rich solution and left …read more

Oh boy, I get so darn excited when I read anything about the progress of stem cell research. Yes, you know which side of the debate I sit on. Scientists are getting closer and closer to the use of stem cells to help rejuvenate damaged cardiac tissue!
The two major hurdles that needed to be tackled are becoming a reality…
…via Science Daily- solve two problems in the development of a stem cell heart patch. The first is undesirable side effects, such as arrhythmia, that can result from immature and undeveloped cardiomyocytes being introduced to the heart. The second is the need …read more

Here are some links of new publications. All are ideas revisited by me from over the last few months. I read through a lot, and I mean a lot, of science journals and such this morning but the ones that I found the most interesting and news worthy were very similar to research I have shared previous. The new research takes things a step further…
Depression linked to death following heart attack…Depression nearly triples the risk of death following a heart attack, even when accounting for other heart attack risk factors, according to research presented today at the American College …read more

Human embryonic cells has helped rebuild heart tissue in rats. Yes, the research was on rats but promising and welcomed none the less. Here is what the group of US researchers had to report…
Implanting human embryonic stem cells in rats four days after they had heart attacks repaired heart muscles and improved heart function, researchers from the University of Washington and the biotechnology company Geron report in an article appearing Monday in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
Previous attempts to “heal” with stem cells in a cardiac fashion have failed secondary to the limited success of deriving heart cells from …read more

A new “patch” that is placed on damaged portions of a heart can help regenerate cardiac cells after a heart attack and regenerate heart function. This is pretty amazing stuff. Now if we can make the transition from rats to humans we could see a decrease in the need for heart transplants.
“Normally, adult human hearts do not regenerate because the heart doesn’t make more cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells) after injury,” explained lead researcher Dr. Bernhard Kuhn, from the Department of Cardiology at Children’s Hospital Boston. “It would be desirable to induce the heart to make new cardiomyocytes after …read more