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Identification of Heart Master Cells Raises Hope Of Fixing Damaged Heart! Being the master cells of human bodies, stem cells are the source of all cells and tissue in the human body. For years, scientists have been striving to find ways to fix damaged heart using stem cells. So far, it seems that none has yet to find a feasible solution. On July 1, 2009, researchers from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital managed to identify the early master cells that make up the human heart and they believed these cells could be used someday to make patches to fix damaged heart. Published in the journal ‘Nature’, the finding also revealed surprising results on how human hearts develop in the womb and how congenital heart disease develops. Congenital heart disease occurs when there is a defect in the structure of the heart and great vessels of a newborn. It is one of the most common birth defects and is the leading cause of birth defect-related deaths. It affects up to 2 percent of newborns and often requires surgery within days or weeks of birth. No doubt, results of the study can help in understanding what causes heart disease and provide a new way to understanding heart disease that appears in children and adults. However, the researchers admitted that the cell they described is likely not to be used directly as cell-based therapy since it has the possibility of going into too many different cell types. What the researchers intend to do is to look for intermediate cells that can become beating heart muscle, the cells that line the artery, and other heart cell types.
Working entirely with human hearts, the researchers were surprise to discover that the human heart develops quite different from the hearts in mice. Actually, the human heart at birth is more than a thousand times larger than the heart of a adult mouse, yet the size of the initial embryos are close in size. How can this possible, as humans are a lot bigger than mice and every organ is bigger? According to what the researchers explained, the progenitor cells in mice exist for just 48 hours and a mouse develops from conception to birth in just 3 weeks, but humans gestate for approximately 9 months. It was found that human heart develops from patches of these early heart stem cells. And, these patches of stem cells tend to congregate in area associated with congenital heart disease, including the heart valves and pumping chambers. While it is rather impossible and simply too complicated to grow entire hearts using the cells, it might be possible to grow patches to fix areas damaged by heart attack, or faulty valves. Meanwhile, patches of cells could also be used to test drugs for possible unexpected side effects on the heart. The study focused on embryonic stem cells that are found in days-old embryos and which at first can give rise to every cell type. Nevertheless, the researchers are aware that there is controversy in using human embryonic stem cells because of the objection from public on destroying a human embryo. Meanwhile, other scientists have already found means to turn ordinary skin cells into stem cells, which are known as induced plurpotent stem (iPS) cells. It is the aim of the researchers to try and turn iPS cells into heart progenitor cells though they insisted that working with true human embryonic stem cells is important. If human heart progenitor cells can be matched to all the different human tissue and blood types, they might be grown and used for treatments eventually.
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