Watch Lab-Grown Heart Tissue Beat On Its Own [Video]
Human Heart Patrick J. Lynch via Wikimedia Commons Be still my heart. A team of scientists from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine has created lab-grown human heart tissue that can beat on its own, according to a new study in Nature Communications. In 2008, a University of Minnesota study showed that the original cells from a rat heart could be completely flushed out of the heart's external structure in a process called decellularization, then replaced by newborn rat cells to regenerate a working heart. A similar process has now allowed Pitt scientists to grow working human heart tissue within the decellurized structure of a mouse heart. Using various enzymes and special cleansing detergents, the researchers stripped a mouse heart of all its cells to create a scaffold for induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells), adult human cells that are reprogrammed to act like embryonic cells. They treated the iPS...