John Connolly, writing for LifeSiteNews.com, has an exciting report on how new experiments conducted at the University of Minnesota suggest that adult stem cells may prove of inestimable value in providing ethical heart transplants.Scientists have created a beating heart using laboratory techniques that involve adult stem cells and that could revolutionize organ donation.
Scientists at the University of Minnesota reported their findings at the American Heart Association's annual meeting in Orlando, Florida. The highly experimental procedure involved removing all the cells from a rat's dead heart, and using its protein blueprint as a guide for live adult stem cells seeded on the old heart. "We took nature's building blocks to build a new organ," said Harald Ott, who worked on the project. "When we saw the first contractions we were speechless."
The ethical questions concerning heart donation could be completely sidestepped by such a process. Furthermore a new heart, grown in this way, would not be rejected by the patient's immune system, which is a common problem with organ transplants.
The procedure, however, is still in an experimental state, and it will probably be years before it can be tried on humans. Professor Doris Taylor, director of the University of Minnesota's center for cardiovascular repair, is very hopeful that this new breakthrough is a significant step towards the ability to create custom-built hearts as well as other organs.
"The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells," Taylor said. "It opens a door to the notion that you can make any organ - kidney, liver or pancreas. You name it and we hope we can make it. This is a proof of concept. Going forward, our goal is to use a patient's stem cells to build a new heart."
Adult stem cells have led to many breakthroughs in medical science in recent years, in stark contrast to the lack of progress with ethically unacceptable embryonic stem cell research. Adult stem cells may be used to treat everything from heart attacks to damaged teeth. Many experimental projects have shown and are increasingly showing great promise for use of adult stem cells on human subjects.
