Two New Regenerative Medicine Studies Offer Ways Damaged Hearts Can Repair Themselves
Heart Tissue You only get so much of it, but researchers are working to help the body regenerate damaged heart cells. Nephron via Wikimedia Perhaps it's in the nature of regenerative medicine news to multiply. Earlier today stem cell researchers announced the first clinical trial using adult stem cells to treat a spinal cord injury would begin at the end of the month. Now, two studies have hit the wire this afternoon detailing two different ways to fix damaged hearts, one by turning structural cells into beating heart tissue, another by restoring mammals' long-lost ability to regenerate heart tissue much as some amphibians regenerate lost limbs. The first study, conducted at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease at the University of California, San Francisco, reprogrammed fibroblasts -- structural heart cells that cannot beat -- into beating cells by adding a handful of genes into the mix. The team took the...