HOW TO BUILD A HEART

Abstract

First remove all the cells from a dead organ - it does not even have to be from a human - then take the protein scaffold leftbehind and repopulate it with stem cells immunologically matched to the patient in need. Yet the effort may be worthwhile even if it fails, says Alejandro Soto-Gutiérrez, a researcher and surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. "Besides the dream of making organs for transplantation, there are a lot of things we can learn from these systems," he says - including a better basic understanding of cell organization in the heart and new ideas about how to fix one.