Engineering Heart Regeneration
Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine are starting to see a synthesis of the variety of techniques prototyped in past years. Here's a good example of the type via ScienceDaily, using many of the methods so far developed: "When human heart muscle cells derived from embryonic stem cells are implanted into a rat after a heart attack, they can help rebuild the animal's heart muscle and improve function of the organ ... researchers had struggled to get stem cells to differentiate into just cardiomyocytes, or heart muscle cells - most previous efforts resulted in cell preparations in which only a fraction of 1 percent of the differentiated cells were cardiac muscle cells. By treating the stem cells with two growth factors, or growth-encouraging proteins, and then purifying the cells, they were able to turn about 90 percent of stem cells into cardiomyocytes. The researchers dealt with the other big challenge of stem cell death by implanting the cells along with a cocktail of compounds aimed at helping them grow. The cocktail included a growth 'matrix' - a sort of scaffolding for the cells to latch on to as they grow - and drugs that block processes related to cell death. ... 100 percent of rat hearts showed successful tissue grafts."
Link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070826162727.htm