The full study and an abstract were published online in the journal Circulation Research. Here's the link to the abstract, which was too technical for me to understand: http://circres.ahajo...
According to Professor Shulamit Levenberg of the Technion Biomedical Engineering Department and Professor Lior Gepstein of the Faculty of Medicine, this is the first time that three-dimensional human cardiac tissue complete with blood vessels have been constructed that may have unique applications for studies of cardiac development, function and tissue replacement therapy.
Despite progress over the past two decades in treating cardiac disease, there are few good ways to fix damaged heart muscle. One possibility would be to rebuild a broken heart with a transplant of healthy heart tissue. However, scientists have been stymied in these efforts by a lack of human heart tissue to work with and the failure of transplanted tissue to thrive in its new home. The heart tissue grown by the Technion researchers is threaded throughout with a network of tiny blood vessels that would improve the tissue's survival after being transplanted in a human heart, Levenberg says.The researchers engineered the heart muscle by seeding a sponge-like, three-dimensional plastic scaffold with heart muscle cells and blood vessel cells produced by human embryonic stem cells, along with cells called embryonic fibroblasts. ***
This research is just in its beginning stages:
The researchers are preparing to transplant the tissue into living hearts in animals to study how well the heart muscle adapts to its new surroundings. Levenberg says that the technique might also prove useful in engineering tissues for other organs such as the liver.
I have no expert knowledge in this area. One of my reasons for publishing it here is in the hope that some politically oriented expert will see it and speak more to its significance.
When Bill Frist announced in 2005 that he was parting ways with Bush's restrictions on federally funded embryonic stem cell research,http://www.washingto... our old friend Catholic League President William Donohue called Frist "Dr. Duplicity." Recently, Donohue said this about the new Democratically controlled Congress:
It took the House Democrats less than 100 hours this year to voice its support for killing embryos. In other words, despite all the talk about God and respect for human life, the Democrats haven't changed their stripes. Rhetoric is cheap; voting records are what matters."http://www.catholicl...
Again, thank you.