Beating heart created in laboratory

Washington, Jan 14 (UNI) Scientists, for the first time, have created an artificial beating heart in the laboratory, giving new hope to people living with heart failure.

The study, which appears in the latest Nature Medicine journal, offers a way to fulfil the promise of using stem cells to grow tailor-made organs for transplant.

By using a process called whole organ decellularisation, scientists from the University of Minnesota , US, grew functioning heart tissue by taking dead rat and pig hearts and reseeding them with a mixture of live cells, the Science Daily reported.

''The idea was to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells,'' said Dr Doris Taylor, principal investigator of the research.

Decellularisation is the process of removing all of the cells from an organ -- in this case an animal cadaver heart -- leaving only the extracellular matrix, the framework between the cells, intact.

Researchers hope that the process could be used to make new donor organs.

''It opens a door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas -- you name it and we hope we can make it,'' Dr Taylor said.

Millions of people across the world are living with Heart failure-- a condition that can result from any structural or functional cardiac disorder that impairs the ability of the heart to fill with or pump a sufficient amount of blood through the body.

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