Dead Hearts Beat Again in Medical Breakthrough

Scientists in the US have achieved a breakthrough that could change the way organ transplant is done; they have managed to get recycled hearts taken from animal cadavers to start beating again. The scientists reseeded the hearts with live cells to achieve this miracle, reported the British journal Nature Medicine.

The achievement, if it can be extended to humans, can give new life to millions of terminally ill patients waiting for replacement organs. With this procedure, not only hearts but a virtually inexhaustible supply of other organs can also be provided for such patients.

Advances have been made in generating living heart tissue in the lab; this however is the first time that life has been blown back into a complete, bio-artificial heart. This has been made possible through a core procedure known as decellularisation.

The procedure involves stripping away all cells from an organ using powerful detergents. Only a bleached-white scaffolding composed of proteins secreted by the cells is left behind. In their experiment, the researchers used the heart of a dead rat to achieve this.

The researchers then injected the derived matrix with a mixture of cells taken from the hearts of newborn rats. This was placed in a sterile lab setting to check whether it would grow. Within four days, the heart started showing contractions and on the eighth day, the heart actually started pumping. “When we saw the first contractions, we were speechless,” said Harald Ott, a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital and one of the study authors.

We certainly were surprised that it worked so well and so quickly,” said Dr. Doris Taylor, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota and lead study author. “There are so many places this could have gone wrong.”

While the heart did beat, the force was equivalent to only about two percent of an adult rodent heart. Dr. Taylor and her team are now working on creating more efficient recycled organs. They are simultaneously testing whether the hearts can keep an animal alive by transplanting some of the organs into the abdomens of rats and connecting them to the animals’ aortas.

The researchers are now hoping to transfer their success to humans, in whom the objective would be to inject stem cells drawn directly from the recipient of the donated organ. This would virtually remove the risk of the new heart being rejected by the immune system of the donor.

With nearly 50,000 patients in the US alone dying due to lack of donor hearts each year and more than 22 million people worldwide living under the fear of heart failure, this procedure could prove to be a godsend for them. “The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells," said Dr. Taylor.

The authors believe that the recent developments in stem cell research have already created the means for generation of new tissues from non-embryo sources. According to Dr. Ott, there are many patients not currently listed as potential recipients but who might one day benefit from such a transplanted bio-artificial organ. “If organs derived from a patient’s own cells would become available on a large scale – maybe even as an off-the-shelf product – millions of patients suffering from organ failure would benefit,” he said.

The researchers opine that decellularisation has the potential to change the way scientists approach engineering 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.

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