Ghost Heart- Reanimating Lifeless Organs

I found this article particularly interesting and appropriate considering today is Halloween. It describes the cardiac research of Doris Taylor, who has devised a method to reanimate a "ghost heart." She treats a rat heart with detergent, which flushes all the cells away and leaves only the translucent extracellular matrix of the heart. Mature and progenitor cardiac cells are then added to this organ scaffolding. The infused cells seem to inherently know how to proliferate and grow into the functional shape of a heart that is capable of beating. Several obstacles still remain before this procedure can create fully functional implantable organs. One such obstacle is creating the vasculature that surrounds, leads in, and leads out of the heart. Dr. Taylor is addressing this problem by flushing vascular tissue of other animals, such as rats, and using them to replace human arteries of similar size. Innervating the reanimated heart is also another issue, but it could be stimulated with a pacemaker like current organ transplants. This method is especially exciting because the organ can be made from donor cells from the patients own body, so there is no risk of rejection. The ultimate goal is to be able to engineer a functional heart that can be implanted in a patient from a detergent flushed pig heart, which has proportions similar to a human heart. This process can also be applied to other organs such as kidneys, lungs, livers, etc.

This article makes me excited about the future. It is such an ingenious, relatively simple idea that has seemingly endless applications. The flexibility of being able to get an organs overall structure from an animal source, and infuse it with a patients own cells to make a compatible functioning organ is almost too good to be true. If the technology can be refined, it could certainly make heart disease, or any major organ disease a thing of the past.

http://www.popsci.com/elizabeth-svoboda/article/2008-09/ghost-heart