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Using heart cells, researchers create a beating heart
Results from a recent experiment may represent breakthrough for regenerative medicine.
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Using the heart's own infrastructure as a scaffold, researchers at the University of Minnesota have succeeded in creating a beating heart from neonatal rat heart cells.
The researchers, using a novel procedure that stripped away the living cells from the rigid structural matrix that serves as the heart's skeleton, replaced the cells with fresh heart cells and nourished them to grow. The result was the creation of completely new beating rat hearts that survived for up to 40 days in some instances.
Filling in the scaffolding
According to a press release, the researchers used a process called whole organ decellularization to accomplish the task. Detergents were flushed into a rat heart to remove its living cells, while the more rigid framework between the cells was left intact. These cells, which in their totality are called the extracellular matrix, act as a skeleton for the structure of the heart and do not get washed away with the other cells.
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Source: University of Minnesota |
Using this cellular skeleton as a framework, the researchers then repopulated the matrix with neonatal heart cells from a newborn rat. The new growing heart cells were put into a sterile lab environment where they were nurtured and stimulated with electrodes. Shortly thereafter, these cells began to grow and contract within the matrix, and newly formed hearts were pumping after eight days.
"I can't tell you what it feels like to see this previously dead scaffold beating in a dish" said Doris Taylor, PhD, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota, in a press interview. "What it means for the first time is that we have the opportunity to create an organ- not just a little piece of tissue, not just a cell- but an organ. It was amazing."
The hearts created in the laboratory functioned as a fraction of a normal heart. Experiments are currently being conducted to determine if higher-performance hearts can be grown in the same manner. The researchers are continuing to experiment with the procedure using both rat and porcine hearts. The findings, according to one of the researchers, bode well for regenerative medicine.
"What we present is a novel platform, a technique that might or might not work out, to ease the engineering of artificial cells or organs and in particular, the heart," Harald Ott, MD, former scientific director at the University of Minnesota and a surgical resident at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, told Cardiology Today. "It is just a matter of bringing together the right people to move onto other organs, where in some preliminary experiments, we were able to apply the same decellularization technique with similar results." — Eric Raible
This is extraordinary. Various attempts have been made to grow organs or pieces of organs before. As far as I know, this is the first time anybody has succeeded in growing a heart that beats and functions. It seems like the key here is that they used the decelluarized fibrous skeleton of the heart. What that suggests to me is there is some information encoded in this fibrous skeleton that the stem cells have the ability to interpret, and they then use that information to grow into muscles and blood vessels. That is remarkable, especially if this can be replicated in larger animals within the next 10 years.
— Carl J. Pepine, MD
One thing that I keep hearing is the question of applicability. There are so many important findings from this study. One of the key things is that it shows us the potential of cellular therapy and demonstrates why we are excited about it. That does not mean that we do not have a lot of work to do. For example, we are not going to take cells out of the heart, but the model that they developed is a very unique model, so that will allow us to look at different cells. Perhaps most important is that this study shows that to make big steps in science you sometimes have to think outside the box and think of things that others do not think are possible.
— Tim Henry, MD
Director of Research at the Minnesota Heart Institute Foundation, Minneapolis
For more information:
- Ott H, Matthiesen T, Goh S et al. Perfusion-decellularized matrix: Using nature's platform to engineer a bioartificial heart. Nature Medicine. 2008;doi:10.1038/nm1684. Accessed Jan. 14, 2008.