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Progress in lab-made heart cells

13/12/2007

Significant progress has been made in developing beating heart cells derived from stem cells, scientists said today.

Researchers from Imperial College London (ICL) claim to have solved some of the basic problems standing in the way of creating cells to help heal damaged hearts.

In laboratory tests they observed stem cell-derived heart cells maturing over a seven-month period with coordinated beating activity.

They also saw the cells adopting the mature controls found in the adult heart by approximately four months after their generation from embryonic stem cells.

Stem cells can be transformed into any of the 220 cell types found in the human body and therefore scientists believe they hold great promise in the treatment of illness and degenerative diseases.

As well as working out how to develop fully functional heart cells from stem cells, scientists also need to find a way to attach these cells to the wall of the heart.

The ICL team says it has overcome a significant hurdle by developing a new biomaterial with a high level of biocompatibility with human tissue, tailored elasticity and programmable degradation.

The latter quality is vital as any cell 'scaffold' needs to be in place long enough for them to integrate with the organ but then degrade safely away.

Speaking at the UK Stem Cell Initiative conference in Coventry, the researchers explained that the new material can be programmed to degrade in anything from two weeks upwards.

Lead researcher Professor Sian Harding said there is "still some way" to go before a treatment for damaged hearts in clinics, but added that "excellent progress" has been made in "solving some of the basic problems with stem cell heart therapies".

"The work we have done represents a step forward in both understanding how stem cell-derived developing heart cells can be matured in the laboratory and how materials could be synthesised to form a patch to deliver them to damaged areas of the heart," she added.

Further research will be undertaken to see how the material and cell combination behave in the long term.