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Researchers Create Beating Heart In Lab

Posted by kdawson on Sun Jan 13, 2008 05:23 PM
from the keeps-on-ticking dept.
Biotech Science
Sunday Scientist writes "Minnesota researchers have created a beating heart in the laboratory. In a process called whole organ decellularization, they grew functioning heart tissue by using dead rat and pig hearts as a sort of flesh matrix, and reseeding them with a mixture of live cells. The goal is to grow replacement parts, using their own stem cells, for people born with defective tickers or experiencing heart failure."
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  • Wizard of Oz (Score:5, Funny)

    by hack slash (1064002) on Sunday January 13 2008, @05:26PM (#22028596)
    Tin Man will be so pleased.
  • With the advances in biotechnology, it's amusing to think that Larry Niven in his Gil "The Arm" Hamilton stories (collected in Flatlander [amazon.com] ) foresaw a future where you'd get the death penalty for just about anything just so that the state could rip out your organs for donation into someone needing it. In Niven's future history, the use of organ transplants ends only hundreds of years in the future when alloplasty ("gadgets instead of organs") is developed. Now, in just 2007, we're getting close to synthesizing real organs instead of transplanting or making little machines.

    • Re:Unthinkable just 25 years ago (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cnettel (836611) on Sunday January 13 2008, @05:59PM (#22028920)
      Or, maybe, like in many kinds of SF, the specifics of technology available is just as well chosen to make the story interesting, even in hard SF. It's supposed to tickle your imagination, not as a technology roadmap. Hence, to paint the picture of a society where this becomes common practice over the course of generations, of course you need to stipulate that the problem is hard, just like some people chose to assume that somewhat-strong AI or FTL drive is far more feasible than it was maybe reasonable to assume.

      • Re:Unthinkable just 25 years ago (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Firethorn (177587) on Sunday January 13 2008, @06:31PM (#22029188) Homepage Journal
        In this case, I figure that the creator was going for serious SciFi, not just a mcguffin to make the story interesting. You just have to remember that even the most expert SciFi writer isn't going to be 100% of on the science of his day - much less how it'll play out in the future.

        Wikipedia placed the publish date of "The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton" in 1976, The first successful kidney transplant was in 1954(for identical twins, so no rejection)and the first human heart & liver transplants were in 1967.

        So, at the time the story was written - humanity seemed to be on a steady march towards being able to transplant more and more organs. Cloning hadn't made the news yet. Stem cells were hardly known to the public.

        So I could see an author, in 1976, positing that eventually our desire for replacement organs might warp society a bit. The usage of convicts sentenced to death for this would be the mcguffin, as would the expansion of death penalty cases.

        Meanwhile, 30 years later we're getting close to being able to clone (just)organs, we've discovered making computers fast and small is easier than large and smart, we have NOT conquered the human mind, space, or the sea like the writers of the '50s thought.

        At least we aren't quite as screwed up as the author of 'soylent green' would have you believe.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by cnettel (836611)
          I really don't see the conflict between serious science fiction and some degree of artistic license. The point is that the scenario should seem conceivable, "this is one possible future development". It doesn't have to be the one that the author her/himself deems the very most likely. After all, if every story written was part of the author's personal ML estimate optimum of the future at the point of writing, one would either run into a complete inability to write any coherent works (the prediction would co
    • In A Gift from Earth, a colony world uses organ harvesting to punish criminals and dissidents, and rewards loyalty to the regime with spare parts.

      In the course of the novel, a slower-than-light starship arrives with a how-to guide for a brand-new technology: Custom-grown organs. The protagonist sees grown-from-seed organs developing in a tank, and assumes that they are from children! Actually, they spell the end of the local tyranny.

      That was in 1968, just a year or two after the first "Gil the Arm" story.

    • Re:Unthinkable just 25 years ago (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ppanon (16583) on Sunday January 13 2008, @07:06PM (#22029472) Homepage Journal
      Well, Niven's government ordered organ collection stories may not have been too far off either if Falun Dafa practitioners are to be believed [www.cbc.ca]. There's been ongoing rumours of organlegging in Asia for a while, and even the UK is being more aggressive about organ collection [bbc.co.uk].

      The advantage of using your own stem cells instead of parts of some poor sap cut up for his crimes or beliefs, is that the former should be less subject to rejection. Assuming they ever get this approach viable for use in humans. I'm hoping so because, as the population becomes an increasingly aged one in Western countries, the pressure on organ banks is going to increase. And as the population becomes increasingly obese, the supply of healthy candidates for organ donations is only going to decrease.

      Oh well, it could be worse. Transplants could have been available back when people thought debtor's prison was a good idea.

  • Interesting engineering opportunities (Score:5, Interesting)

    by G4from128k (686170) on Sunday January 13 2008, @05:29PM (#22028624)
    This presents a long-term opportunity for the next phase in body modification. Who says that a "replacement" organ must be identical to the original equipment? Perhaps athletes will opt for an enlarged six-chambered heart or an abdominal booster-heart to improve endurance.
    • I doubt it. It would be almost impossible to hide a 6 chambered artificial heart from the IOC doping testers. You'd be much better off just sticking to old fashioned performance enhancing drugs. Someone will probably be dumb enough to try it though.
        • Nearly every sport has a doping and non-doping league already. The problem is, people will only pay to see the non-doping leagues at the moment. Which means all the money is in the non-doping league. Which means all the dopers try to cheat and compete in the non-doping league. This problem seems unlikely to ever go away.

          • Nearly every sport has a doping and non-doping league already. The problem is, people will only pay to see the non-doping leagues at the moment. Which means all the money is in the non-doping league. Which means all the dopers try to cheat and compete in the non-doping league. This problem seems unlikely to ever go away.
            It seemed to me it was the other way around. But then I don't really follow the sports.
          • "Nearly every sport has a doping and non-doping league already."

            There are doping leagues for baseball, basketball, and football? I've never heard of that. Are you talking about a European thing?

            "The problem is, people will only pay to see the non-doping leagues at the moment."

            In the one sport I know of that does have doping and non-doping, bodybuilding, the doping league is where the money is overwhelmingly made. Maybe this is just a US thing, don't know.

        • Re:Interesting engineering opportunities (Score:5, Interesting)

          by bwalling (195998) on Sunday January 13 2008, @06:17PM (#22029078) Homepage

          This is how we're going to evolve, from here on out.
          I seriously hope that I die before that comes to pass. Given the greed in this world, modding humans will only lead to a greater disparity between "have" and "have not." I'd like to hope for better, but it seems like that would just be foolish.

          • Re:Interesting engineering opportunities (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Rich0 (548339) on Sunday January 13 2008, @06:52PM (#22029336) Homepage
            I dunno - you're thinking about haves and have-nots in terms of cash. But I'm thinking in terms of genetics. Why should some girls be "prettier" than others, and some guys able to run faster, think smarter, play piano better, or be born without what we'd consider "mental defects"? This way in theory anybody could participate in the Tour de France, or marry an old rich guy.

            In any case, I think its inevitable - so there is not much point in arguing about it. Everybody uses their strengths to make up for their weaknesses. The fact that humans are much better in brains than just about anything else just means that the brains will figure out a way to make up for the rest.

            What's the difference between having a few extra heart chambers vs wearing eyeglasses or a hearing aid?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by sltd (1182933)
      The problem is you would have to make it from existing stem cells. You would probably get them from the person, or wherever. If I understand it correctly, you would be limited to normal human physiology, for compatibility reasons. There's the form factor, yes, but also getting everything connected, and you'd have to actually grow a six-chambered heart. At this stage, they're just barely getting a beating heart, so creative engineering like you're suggesting is, at best, quite a way away.
    • What I've often wondered is why our artificial hearts have a heartbeat. I mean, if it only has to move blood, why don't we use something akin to a centrifugal pump that would move blood in a constant stream instead of thump-thump-----thump-thump-----thump-thump? It seems there are more moving parts in an artificial heart than would be necessary.
      • "What I've often wondered is why our artificial hearts have a heartbeat. I mean, if it only has to move blood, why don't we use something akin to a centrifugal pump that would move blood in a constant stream..."

        That's more than likely to result in your body's finely tuned system malfunctioning. Just imagine taking a "normal" engine out of a car and replacing it with Mazda's Wanker engine - I'm sure you'll end up with with a huge mess, leaking fluids all over the place. Not to mention a broken crank shaft.
      • I think there's one that uses the constant stream thing... (read about it on slashdot a few years ago?). I think the downside is that it causes arteries to accumulate stuff (ie: the beats tend to move things that would otherwise settle on the walls).

      • Install several in parallel (Score:5, Funny)

        by MonkeyBoyo (630427) on Sunday January 13 2008, @05:44PM (#22028784)
        If you can grow replacement hears, then you can grow more than one.

        Think of the gains of installing 2 in parallel, or even 4.

        Though it would probably be nice to get their beating synchronized.

        • Re:Install several in parallel (Score:5, Funny)

          by qw0ntum (831414) on Sunday January 13 2008, @06:49PM (#22029318) Journal
          Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those things! ...sorry.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by AJWM (19027)
          The hydrodynamics would be interesting. Yeah, two in parallel, synchronized, would probably be simplest from that standpoint, but one wonders what it would do to one's blood pressure. The complications are probably why no animal has ever evolved a double (separate) heart (no vertebrate, anyway). (We need two pumps as it is to compensate for the pressure drop in (1) the lungs and (2) rest of the body, we solve that by making the two pumps beat as one, as it were (our four-chambered heart, one side for ve
  • While on the surface this is very exciting and welcome news, understand that this: development still has a very long way to go before it will be truly useful. It will be a very long time until an engineered heart will be placed in a human chest saving someone's life. It may or may not happen in our lifetime (or ever for that matter).

    • Don't go abusing your body assuming you'll be able to get a new heart any time soon.

      Of course, as late as the mid 1950s reputable engineers scoffed at the ideas of flights to the moon. This could come together faster than you can imagine.

      • Don't go abusing your body assuming you'll be able to get a new heart any time soon.

        Of course, as late as the mid 1950s reputable engineers scoffed at the ideas of flights to the moon. This could come together faster than you can imagine.

        It could but I still don't see why exactly I would want to take that chance. I mean it might not be ready in time for me which would result in death. If it is ready in time, then you are still looking at heart transplant surgery which sounds umm, painful and expensive amoung other things. I will stick with the parent posters ounce of prevention mentality, thank you very much.

    • development still has a very long way to go before it will be truly useful.

      You might be surprised. I wouldn't be surprised if it happens in my lifetime.

      They noted that the hearts were beating within 8 days - while I presume it might take longer for effective beating, I could see specially prepared pig hearts be decelled and then reseeded with stem cells from the human patient. A month later, they transplant, with no lingering need for immune suppression drugs.

      While fusion is still two decades away, at lea

  • choices, choices... (Score:4, Funny)

    by smokejive (1136035) on Sunday January 13 2008, @05:37PM (#22028710) Homepage
    Now the big question is, do I go for the replacement legs that give me more speed and let me jump higher, or do I become more stealthy. Choices, choices...

  • Cool, but... (Score:5, Funny)

    by owlnation (858981) on Sunday January 13 2008, @05:54PM (#22028868)
    ...it's pronounced "Fronkensteen".
  • I'm firmly in Kurzweil's camp with developments like this. I intend to live just long enough (naturally) that I can live forever (engineered).
    • I intend to live just long enough (naturally) that I can live forever (engineered).

      If you're a boomer, forget it.

      (At the age of about 11, back in the late 1950s, I was expecting medical technology to be able to stimulate the growth of a "third set" of replacement teeth - tooth-by-tooth as necessary, by the time my adult teeth might be worn out or destroyed by decay or misadventure. More than half a century later where's THAT flying car?)

      The FDA approval process takes long enough (currently a minimum of 10
      • The FDA approval process takes long enough (currently a minimum of 10 years) that even if a treatment useful for your program is perfected TODAY it won't be available in time to be of use. I

        Fortunately, FDA jurisdiction is only over the United States. When you want a new heart, you'll just take a flight to Mexico or India, and have a nice vacation while you're at it.

        -jcr

        • And to think, medical is free over seas :D
            • How sure are you? I mean would you be paying for the health care or using their free system?

              And I seriously don't think the US government has held back research on stem cells. They just don't pay for it. Not every medical tech needs to be funded by the government.

              • Re:If you're a Boomer, forget it. (Score:4, Informative)

                by Ungrounded Lightning (62228) on Sunday January 13 2008, @09:53PM (#22030570) Journal
                And I seriously don't think the US government has held back research on stem cells. They just don't pay for it.

                Unfortunately, they also consider that, if they ever spent any money on the construction or operation of the facility, they've "paid for it" sufficiently that no stem cell research can be done there. That eliminates virtually all medical research facilities - certainly all of 'em that are attached to universites and medical schools.

                (Now if it were up to me the enforcement of that would consist of charging a higher overhead rate - calculated to replace the federal contribution to facility construction and operation under normal accounting principles - to any project that came under the federal ban. But it's not up to me. And the obvious intent of congress was to do their best to ban the research, rather than just pull federal funds.)
      • Life is already way different than when I was a child - Toffler's Future Shock has come to pass at least. Mapping the human genome in circa 2000 and now working on the protein foldings that those base pairs encode will absolutely lead to the ability to build a human (or so) machine out of meat. That is going to happen. Period. The only thing that is unsure is how long it will be held back for primarily religious hallucinations, how available it will be to the populace in general, and whether or not we b
  • ...Of Your Heart.

    It Goes Boom Boody-Boom Boody-Boom Boody-Boom, Boody-Boom Boody-Boom Boody-Boom-Boom-Boom

    Well, Goodness Gracious Me! ...

    Next up on OldTyme Radio overnight, Dr. Hanny Lector and the Cannibals with their top hit, Liver & Chianti. Hope you like it...

  • Not quite creating. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13 2008, @06:05PM (#22028988)
    If I'm reading this right, they didn't so much create a new heart as bring a dead one back to life.

    Which is possibly even cooler, and I'm sure you can find 50k hearts a year in the US that wouldn't normally be donatable because of time constraints. (A heart is (normally!) only good for 4 hours after death or removal iirc). And even beyond saved lives, we can hopefully get a better quality of life too, since there should be less time waiting for a transplant with a half dead body.

    Hmm, do modern artificial hearts last 8 days reliably? And would a diseased heart be practical?

    What about organ rejection issues, will those be causes by the dead heart, the stem cells, both?
    • They're not brining a dead heart back to life. They're getting rid of the cells for the dead heart leaving the extracellular structures intact and then reseeding this structure with new cells. Pretty neat. You'll still get rejection issues only if you use cells that aren't from the recipient of said heart. Otherwise, if you're able to use recipient cells to seed, there will be no rejection issues.

  • blimey. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by apodyopsis (1048476) on Sunday January 13 2008, @06:06PM (#22028992)
    if i read the article and the similar one on the BBC correctly then there was a shell of a heart they laced with stem cells that regrew into a heart functionality- but after 8 days operating at 2% so longer growth term is needed to by functional. this would go part way to solving rejection issue obviously, but if i am correct there is one slight problem you cannot take the patients heart, decellularize it and regrow it with stem cells because (1) bad as he heart is he needs it and (2) you still need to manufacture stem cells in sufficient quantity.

    so there are a few options I see...

    1. one use a dead donor heart as a shell and recellularize (that cannot be the correct term) with the patients stem cells assuming you can get them while he survives on what is left of his old heart and then transplant and hope there is no rejection

    2. transplant the patient with an artificial heart until his old one can be repaired in the lab

    3. find some way to create a fake heart "shell"? maybe extract some tissue from his current heart but not enough to kill him and create a template that the stem cells can be used to grow him a new heart over a few months.

    of course they still need to manufacture a sufficient source of patient stem cells. does this sound reasonable?

    of course in the UK, we have just got a new source of donors... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7186007.stm [bbc.co.uk] our prime minister has just decided to add the entire country onto the donor list unless we explicitly opt out. Gill the Arm would be amused...
  • Wow, I mean just wow. To think that most of the organs can be re-grown or replaced would provide a limited form of immortality, just replace an organ when it wears out and not to fear rejection.

  • The "other piece" is also nearly there. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ungrounded Lightning (62228) on Sunday January 13 2008, @06:25PM (#22029146) Journal
    In a process called whole organ decellularization, they grew functioning heart tissue by using dead rat and pig hearts as a sort of flesh matrix, and reseeding them with a mixture of live cells. The goal is to grow replacement parts, using their own stem cells, for people born with defective tickers or experiencing heart failure.

    Given that another project also underway is "writing" synthetic organs using a rapid prototyping system (3D plotter) loaded with live cells, structural proteins, and growth factors, the salvaged-and-decellularlized organ should be rendered unnecessary in short order.

    The fact that a substrate with the right chemical markers can be repopulated into a working organ means the process can proceed in two steps. This may make it easier to accomplish - especially by reducing the need for functioning blood-supply plumbing to provide nutrition and oxygenation in the eary stages of construction.

  • But will you be able to afford it? (Score:3, Informative)

    by joh (27088) on Sunday January 13 2008, @06:28PM (#22029162)
    I mean, really. The stinkin' rich will have their hearts replicated and grown one after another just in case, while you and me will just drop down, carried to a hospital, and die. Somehow that's *not* the future I was thinking of when I was young. The bits and pieces (hah!) are there meanwhile, but our society isn't there at all.

    A friend of mine was working in a hospital when some old and ill VIP had a heart failure and he not only got a replacement right away (while others died waiting for a replacement for months), no, he also got a second heart when the first one was rejected by his immune system within a day. Well, he died anyway from unrelated causes soon after, but I can't get over the vision of two otherwise perfectly healthy normal guys dying just because two hearts were *wasted* this way. I want to vomit each time I have to think of that event.

  • I hope they have adequate containment measures. We wouldn't want it to just keep growing and growing... [thethunderchild.com]

  • It has escaped from the laboratory, and is heading for your house.

    You should consider smearing Jello on your kitchen floor and setting fire to your sofa.

  • Can I buy one... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Alsee (515537) on Sunday January 13 2008, @07:04PM (#22029460) Homepage
    ...for my ex-girlfriend?
    I don't think she ever had one.

    -
  • but i remember details from high school biology, where you could put heart cells next to each other on a petri dish, and they would synch their beats

    so the announcement seems like there is this major advance, heart cells beating in tandem, shaped like a heart. but it doesn't seem to take that much more technical acumen than what has been around for a while, as heart cells will naturally synch up

    so they put the cells and grew them in a heart shaped matrix. then biorhythms and mother nature took over

    they've been doing that with skin cells for awhile

    again, not to rain on the parade, but i think the technical leap implied here is being overstated. it's good news nonetheless, and i cheer it

    • Imagine waking up from a cyber-dream only to realize you're competing with dead rats and pigs...

      Are you that guy with the sign; "Will code HTML for food"?

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by KiahZero (610862)
        Malnutrition is caused entirely by economics, not a lack of substantive scientific work.

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