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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

A team of researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital's Center for Regenerative Medicine have outlined the steps required to create a bioengineered heart suitable for transplantation [kurzweilai.net]:

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) [massgeneral.org] researchers have taken early steps towards producing a bioengineered heart for transplantation that would use cells from the patient receiving the heart.

Using a patient's own cells would help to overcome some of the problems associated with receiving a heart donated by another person, including immune rejection of the donated heart, as well as the long-term side effects of life-long treatment with the immunosuppressive drugs needed to suppress the immune system and reduce the risk of rejection.

To achieve those steps, Jacques Guyette [harvard.edu], PhD, of the Massachusetts General Hospital's Center for Regenerative Medicine [massgeneral.org], lead author of a paper in Circulation Research, says the research team had to overcome three major technical challenges.

Those steps are creating a structural scaffold from a donated heart of a deceased person, stripping away muscle cells and other components that would be rejected, coaxing induced pluripotent stem cells from the patient to grow into spontaneously contracting heart-like muscle cells, re-seeding the heart scaffold with the muscle cells, and incubating the heart in a bioreactor.

Bioengineering Human Myocardium on Native Extracellular Matrix [ahajournals.org] (DOI: 10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.115.306874)

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