October 4th, 2004
Building New Hearts
The Toronto Star reports on the efforts of tissue engineerers to grow the components of hearts, one piece at a time. "When you are born you have a certain number of heart cells. They get bigger but they really don't grow. So if a person's heart is damaged ideally we'd like to take a sample of their heart tissue, expand it and develop living heart cells' paths with their own tissue." Growing replacements for complex organs like the heart from a patient's own cells is the grail of current tissue engineering research. The ability to replace age-damaged organs or tissue as required offers the possibility of greatly extended healthy life spans.