Tissue engineering's whole purpose is to replace biological functions with new cell material products. Mostly, tissue engineers try to repair portions of organs that have been damaged. However, earlier this year, Doris Taylor made medical history by creating an entirely new rat heart in a lab. This beating heart was made by leaving only nonliving matrix of the rat's heart and redesigning it with new heart cells. To first remove all the cells to get to the matrix, detergents were pumped throughout the organ to wash away the debris in the network of blood vessels. This left the extracellular matrix or ECM as a matrix of protein fibers that create the connective tissue in the heart. This ECM was basically a skeleton of the organ's 3-D structure that was then formed into a heart with new cells. These cells were a mix of stem and progenitor cells from newborn rats that were injected into the left ventricle of the ECM. After pumping nutrients and oxygen throughout the heart and its blood vessels, four days later the heart starting contracting. The heart was then stimulated by electrodes to synchronize the beats. Taylor is continuing her study with experimenting with pig hearts and their own ECM. The hope is that one day new hearts will be creating for the 5 million people living with heart failure. This new advancement in tissue engineering could someday make organ transplants obsolete.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Taylor
http://www1.umn.edu/umnnews/Feature_Stories/Researchers_create_a_new_heart_in_the_lab.html
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