Topic: Growing new hearts and presumably other organs.

[Nemesis]

Link to full article

But now Doris Taylor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, US, and colleagues have "decellularised" rat hearts by adding chemicals that break up cells, leaving behind just the connective tissue, which is made of proteins.

They found that the resulting scaffolds still have the heart's complex three-dimensional shape, including space for all the blood vessels.

Seed cells

They seeded the scaffolds with blood vessel and heart muscle cells from newborn rats and flowed a soup of nutrients through the scaffold. The seed cells migrated throughout the structure and grew into muscle and blood vessels.

The team also applied small electrical jolts to trigger beating. Within four days, the tissue had started to contract, and within just 8 days the new heart was pumping with 2% of the efficiency of an adult heart.

[KBF-Crim]

Ah...another use for the unborn...

[Nemesis]

Ah...another use for the unborn...

At the end of the article was this:

She says that seeding could be done with a recipient's own cells, avoiding the immune response that complicates organ transplants. "It can be applied to any organ taken from cadavers – that opens up new possibilities for saving lives," she adds.

The article also said newborn not unborn.  A newborn can lose a few cells and be unharmed, just as you can. 

During development work starting with using the easiest cells to prove the concept makes sense.  Then you can move on to using the best cells which may not be so easy to work with once you have proven that it can by done.

You might also read this link.

For the first time, human embryonic stem cells have been obtained without having to destroy the embryos they came from.

[AlchemistiD]

Load up ladies, we now know where ground zero of the zombie apocalypse is.

[Nemesis]

Of a similar nature.  (Link to full article)

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Scientists in Finland said they had replaced a 65-year-old patient's upper jaw with a bone transplant cultivated from stem cells isolated from his own fatty tissue and grown inside his abdomen.

Researchers said on Friday the breakthrough opened up new ways to treat severe tissue damage and made the prospect of custom-made living spares parts for humans a step closer to reality.

"There have been a couple of similar-sounding procedures before, but these didn't use the patient's own stem cells that were first cultured and expanded in laboratory and differentiated into bone tissue," said Riitta Suuronen of the Regea Institute of Regenerative Medicine, part of the University of Tampere.

[Beeblebrox]

Ah...another use for the unborn...

While we're revolutionizing medicine maybe we could beat the power shortfall by collecting the kinetic energy generated by millions of knees jerking all at once. 



IIIIiiiiiiiiiiiiii'mmmmm kidding.  (Truly, just a mild tease.)  Seriously though, the last report I heard on stem cells indicated that they can be generated from a patient's own skin cells.  I know the very idea of stem cells has been demonized by certain sectors of the political spectrum but surely no one could object to the use of the patient's own skin to save his life.  One very exciting use for stem cells may, one day, be in the treatment of mental health or brain related maladies like epilepsy and other seizure-inducing conditions.