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Doris Taylor
Integrative Biology and Physiology
PHOTO BY RICHARD ANDERSON
A rat heart in three stages of decellularization via a process developed at the University by Taylor and her colleagues.
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PHOTO BY THOMAS MATTHIESEN
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In a medical first, University researchers have created a beating heart in the laboratory. Using detergents, they stripped away the cells from rat hearts until only the nonliving matrix was left; they then repopulated the matrix with fresh heart cells.
If perfected, the technique may be used someday to generate new hearts for patients. In the United States alone, about 5 million people live with heart failure, 550,000 new cases are diagnosed every year, and 50,000 die waiting for a donor heart. The work is published online in the January 13 issue of Nature Medicine.
"The results were a home run," says Doris Taylor, director of the University's Center for Cardiovascular Repair and a principal investigator on the study. "We knew that cell therapy--that is, transplanting cells into the heart--is not a panacea. So we started thinking, 'Is there a way to use cells to engineer heart tissue?'"
The idea, she says, is to create whole new blood vessels or organs by implanting a patient's own cells into a matrix derived from a donor organ. This approach ought to bypass the problem of organ rejection because the matrix, being devoid of cells, shouldn't provoke an immune response. Even if it did, the new cells would lay down a fresh matrix of their own, which would turn off the immune response and free patients from the need to take immunosuppressive drugs.
The process, called whole organ recellularization, can be done "with virtually any organ," Taylor says. "I'd like to think that these kinds of innovations will continue to happen at the U because the state realizes that we can change the world of medicine here in Minnesota."
By Deane Morrison
Excerpted from UMNnews, an e-publication of University Relations. View the full article.
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