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<H1 class=head _extended="true">Beating Heart Grown in Lab Brings New Hope for
Custom-built Organs </H1>
<P class=date _extended="true">Sunday, January 13, 2008</P><IMG class=byline
alt="" src="http://www.foxnews.com/images/service_ap_36.gif" _extended="true">
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<P _extended="true"><STRONG _extended="true">WASHINGTON — <FONT
size=2 _extended="true">Researchers seeking new treatments for heart disease
managed to grow a rat heart in the lab and start it beating.</FONT></STRONG></P>
<P _extended="true"><FONT size=2 _extended="true">"While it still sounds like
science fiction, we've hopefully opened a new door in the notion that we can
build these tissues and one day provide options for patients with end-stage
disease," said Dr. Doris Taylor, director of the Center for Cardiovascular
Repair at the University of Minnesota. "We're not there yet, but at least now we
have another tool in our tool belt."</FONT></P>
<P _extended="true"><FONT size=2 _extended="true">Taylor led the team whose
research appeared in Sunday's online edition of the journal Nature
Medicine.</FONT></P>
<P _extended="true"><FONT size=2 _extended="true">Scientists have worked for
years for ways to grow body parts. Many efforts have focused on heart valves as
an alternative to the plastic or animal valves that wear out after being
implanted in humans.</FONT></P>
<P _extended="true"><FONT size=2 _extended="true">An estimated 5 million
Americans live with heart failure and about 550,000 new cases are diagnosed each
year in the United States. Approximately 50,000 die annually waiting for a heart
donor.</FONT>
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<P _extended="true"><FONT size=2 _extended="true">Taylor said in a telephone
interview that her team began by trying to determine if it were possible to
transplant rat heart cells. They took the hearts from eight newborn rats and
removed all the cells. Left behind was a gelatin-like matrix shaped like a heart
and containing conduits where the blood vessels had been. Scientists then
injected cells back into this scaffold -- muscle cells and endothelial cells,
which line blood vessels.</FONT></P>
<P _extended="true"><FONT size=2 _extended="true">The muscle cells covered the
matrix walls and lined up together, while the endothelial cells found their way
inside to coat the blood vessels, she said. Then the hearts were stimulated
electrically.</FONT></P>
<P _extended="true"><FONT size=2 _extended="true">"By two days we saw tiny,
microscopic contractions, and by seven to eight days there were contractions
large enough to see with the naked eye," she said. The tiny hearts could pump
liquid at about one-fourth the rate of a normal fetal rat's heart.</FONT></P>
<P _extended="true"><FONT size=2 _extended="true">"Obviously we have a long way
to go," Taylor said. But the long-term hope, she said, is that a similar process
could work with either human hearts from cadavers or pig hearts, with their
cells stripped off and replaced by cells from the person needing a heart
transplant to avoid rejection.</FONT></P>
<P _extended="true"><FONT size=2 _extended="true">The next step is to take a pig
heart, strip away the cells and repopulate it with cells from a pig to see if it
will work in the larger heart.</FONT></P>
<P _extended="true"><FONT size=2 _extended="true">Dr. John Mayer Jr., a heart
specialist and researcher at Children's Hospital in Boston, said the report was
an "important paper that advances the ball down the road." But, he added, "It's
pretty long road."</FONT></P>
<P _extended="true"><FONT size=2 _extended="true">Mayer, who was not part of
Taylor's research team, noted that this was done in a small animal and it
remains to be seen whether the same can be done in larger ones. He also wondered
whether blood would flow freely, without clotting, through the reconstructed
blood vessels.</FONT></P>
<P _extended="true"><FONT size=2 _extended="true">"I think this is an important
contribution, with more work to be done," Mayer said in a telephone
interview.</FONT></P>
<P _extended="true"><FONT size=2 _extended="true">In her research paper, Taylor
also reports that the researchers are working on reseeding cells into other
organs, including lungs, liver and kidneys.</FONT></P>
<P _extended="true"><FONT size=2 _extended="true">The research was funded by the
University of Minnesota and the Medtronic Foundation, the charitable arm of a
medical company that makes heart devices such as stents and
defibrillators.</FONT></SPAN>
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