Virus Rebuilds Heart's Own Pacemaker In Animal Tests

hugheseyau writes "A new pacemaker has been built inside a heart by converting beating muscle into cells which can organise the organ's rhythm, U.S. researchers report. Scientists injected a genetically-modified virus into guinea pigs to turn part of their heart into a new, working pacemaker."

Wizards

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if this would work for the Tin Man...

how if someone with this virus dying?

[septianw]

How if someone with this virus dying but his/her heart still work. is he/she still feel the pain? it must be bad for him/her

Re:how if someone with this virus dying?

[ArsenneLupin]

No, he will just turn into a zombie. And, as everybody knows, zombies feel no pain.

Re:

[septianw]

need some brain job to create zombie.

Re:

[youn]

need some brain job to create zombie.

not for everyone I know :p

Re:

[wonkey_monkey]

jesus, small case J, since i don't respect zombies.

It's still the dude's name. Or do you de-capitalize everyone you don't respect? Just don't call him "Him."

It's OK.

[Andy Prough]

I doubt that He minds whether or not you capitalize the first letter in His name. And He probably doesn't even care if you call Him "him" or "Him".

Re:

[wed128]

since i don't respect zombies.

Or grammar.

I for one

[alendit]

welcome our virus-enhanced guinea pig overlords!

Re:

[ColdWetDog]

Just wait until this information hits the Internet. It'll go viral for sure.

First Steps

[ThunderBird89]

First step along the road to creating the Solanum virus [wikipedia.org]?

Re:

[ThunderBird89]

Just a matter f switching the right genes/bits, it would seem (based on how fast we're accomplishing things deemed impossible with the human body before)...

Re:

[Hes Nikke]

I was thinking more along the lines of Barclay's Protomorphosis Syndrome [memory-alpha.org]

Scared

[Extremus]

Am I wrong to be a bit scared about this kind of research?

Re:

[septianw]

no you are not. we must aware of this kind of research.

Re:Scared

[Hentes]

This doesn't look much different from how the heart regulates itself naturally [wikipedia.org]. It's definitely more natural than a machine pacemaker, and also has less chance to fail. The only problem is that it's much harder to control, unless they find a way to hook it up to the nervous system your heartbeat will be pretty much constant.

Re:

[Zorpheus]

Maybe it is more like the Atrioventricular node [wikipedia.org] than like the Sinoatrial node. This node is acting as a reserve. This triggers a contraction of the muscles at a lower frequency, only if there was no contraction triggered by the Sinoatrial node.

Re:

[ultranova]

Am I wrong to be a bit scared about this kind of research?

Hard to say, since you didn't explain why you are. Explain your reasons, then we can discuss whether they make sense or not.

Re:

[Extremus]

Well said. My fear is that this sort of virus engineering could create deadly viruses that could get out of control. Basically because we don't know enough about viruses to be able to engineer a on-demand vaccine to any possible kind of virus. In my computer scientist kind of mind, I believe that we should only play with this kind of stuff if we can undo any kind of problem that can arise from playing with it. I know that science doesn't work like that, and neither I am saying this kind of research should

Re:

[Amorymeltzer]

The only dangers I see is that the original virus DNA might not be reliable removed, causing the (original!) virus to reproduce and attack the organism, or that the immune system identified the virus shell as dangerous, and starts an attack against the "infected" cells (which in the worst case might turn into a full-blown autoimmune disease).

The first part is actually pretty easy. You typically grow the virus using a plasmid construct you have created. That piece of DNA is just DNA without the viral mechanism, and you can easily sequence it to confirm you got what you wanted, as well as use various reporters for in vivo expression. When you express that plasmid in cells, the virus produced is only from your version and never came in contact with the original.

As for the second, I'm not sure why you would get an auto-immune disease from this -

Interesting

[Taibhsear]

Interesting science but couldn't you do basically the same thing but with stem cells and thus avert the possible viral contagion/FUD/ethics issues?

Re:

[crmarvin42]

I'm fairly certain their are FUD and Ethics issues with stem cells since most of what I've read indicates a preference for embryonic stem cells. This neatly dodges some FUD and Ethics issues, in favor of some that are potentially less difficult to get around.

Can't do much in science these days without confronting FUD and ethics issues, and the risk of viral contagion are pretty low, since this kind of viral manipulation has been going on in labs for a while now without incident.

Re:

[Taibhsear]

Interesting. Thanks for the update.

Guinea pigs?

[Winchy]

The implications of this treatment would be clearer if they identified which animals they used as guinea pigs.

Re:

[Nefarious Wheel]

The implications of this treatment would be clearer if they identified which animals they used as guinea pigs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_pig [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[Winchy]

Woosh!

Terrible headline

[Krau Ming]

The novelty in this work comes from using this gene to restore pacemaker function, ie: the headline should read "Delivery of the gene Tbx18 to heart rebuilds damages pacemaker cells in animal tests". Use of a virus to deliver a gene is a routine procedure in the lab and has been done thousands and thousands of times... the current headline makes it sound like some kind of virus is out there that can improve your heart function, should you happen to be sneezed on by the right person.