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Cardiac Casper: ‘Ghost Heart’ Presents Transplantation Breakthrough
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Molecular biologist Doris Taylor may have found some inspiration in the
ambitious words of Mary Shelley’s fictional character Victor Frankenstein,
who claimed that “the world was to me a secret which I desired to divine.”
Doris Taylor’s ambitions
don’t involve creating a monster but do involve a familiar fusion of life; yet hers include
the scaffolding of a pig’s heart infused with human stem cells to create a personalized, viable, and
acceptable beating heart that the body will embrace via transplantation.
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Taylor’s process of giving birth to these hybrid hearts involves
washing all the cells of a pig’s heart to leave behind an extracellular
matrix, which appears as a “ghost heart” to act as a scaffold for
her work to continue. Blood vessel cells are then infused onto the
matrix and grown for several weeks to
reestablish the blood vessel
network
of the ghost heart.
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Next, immature stem cells are injected across the scaffold, and
subsequently stimulated electrically in a careful and precise
manner to create a connection across the heart and begin the
rhythmic beating of the nearly finished hybrid heart.
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At this stage, the birthing process is complete, but
nurturing does
not end here.
Assistance is provided of course, such as electrical
pumps for support, and being fed oxygen from artificial lungs.
Taylor teaches the heart to pump blood and maintain a blood
pressure.
Artificial blood fills the heart chambers, which the heart
cells learn to squeeze against over time.
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Taylor’s vision involves banking people’s own stem cells from youth
to have ready and available for the growth of an organ of need,
such as a heart, lung, liver, or kidney.
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What the author of the study is saying: “Now we can truly imagine
building a personalized human heart, taking heart transplants from an
emergency procedure where you’re so sick, to a planned procedure,”
Taylor told the audience. “That reduces your risk by eliminating the need
for (antirejection) drugs, by using your own cells to build that heart it
reduces the cost … and you aren’t in the hospital as often, so it improves
your quality of life,” she said. “It’s the first shot at
truly curing the number
one killer of men, women, and children worldwide – heart disease.
And
then I want to make it available to everyone,” said Taylor.
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