Growing Human Heart Tissue from Embryonic Stem Cells
We understand in amazing detail how a heart develops - in mice. Whether the same processes that produce mouse heart tissue also generate heart tissue in humans has been unclear, because we obviously can't do the required experiments on human embryos. But a paper published on Thursday in Nature describes research that used human embryonic stem cells to generate human heart cells, and in the process demonstrated that human and mouse stem cells use similar molecular signaling pathways to develop, or differentiate, from stem cells to various types of heart cells. What this means is that we now have the molecular recipe needed to grow heart tissue from embryonic stem cells. Having that recipe in hand brings us a step closer to an embryonic stem cell-based treatment for damaged hearts. Human Cardiac Cells - Figure 4c from Yang, et al., Nature 453 (2008) doi:10.1038/nature06894 read more
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