Millions of people around the world are currently looking for a heart transplant. But with a huge donor deficiency, most of these patients do not survive. Growing transplanted hearts in a laboratory is actually quite an old dream in the entire medical community, and recently a study published in the journal rarely, a study of circulation has moved things one step closer to reality. As mentioned in this study, a group of researchers succeeded in growing a human heart in a laboratory from stem cells.
After that, two groups of scientists published another study, which showed that in fact it is possible to create the basic elements of the human cardiovascular system from pluripotent stem cells. This knowledge is not only important for reproducing the entire cardiovascular system, but also for transplanted and developing tissues to care for patients with vascular or cardiovascular diseases.
The development of stem tissue replacement tissues is one of the main goals of biology. In the event that any damaged part of the body can be repaired with a tissue that genetically matches the patient, then there is less room for rejection. Thus, a growing stem cell cardiovascular system is one of the most difficult decisions.
Development of capillaries using 3D printers:
Scientists from the University of Baylor and the University of Rice take on the help of three-dimensional printers for the development of functioning capillaries. Capillaries are actually thin and tiny blood vessels that carry blood into the veins from the arteries, and also allow the exchange of nutrients, oxygen and other waste between tissues and blood.
As was common in the journal Biomaterials Science, scientists have basically found two materials that coax endothelial cells, derived from human stem cells, to form as capillaries. Scientists also found that attaching mesenchymal stem cells to this procedure expanded the volume of endothelial cells to create tubular formations that resemble capillaries. Giselle Calderon, lead author of the study, explained the main findings in an interview with Phys.org.
They also stated that these cells are able to form capillary structures in both semi-synthetic material known as GelMA, and in gelatin methacrylate and in natural material known as fibrin.
Development of functional sections:
In another study, published in the journal PNAS, scientists from the University of Wisconsin Madison and the Morgrid Institute stated that they are able to generate targeted arterial endothelial cells that build up the internal parts of human arteries.
For this, the team used laboratory equipment, known as single-band RNA ordering, to find all the important signaling factors that coax human pluripotent stem cells for development in arterial endothelial cells. After that, scientists took the help of the Cas9 / CRISPR gene editing technology to develop arterial "reporter cell lines" that light up like Christmas trees, while the candidate factors were successful in creating "reporter stem cells" for building into the arterial endothelium cells.
Using this two-stage theory, scientists managed to create cells that displayed most of the functions and functions of arterial endothelial cells available in the body. In addition, although these cells were transplanted into a mouse and had a heart attack of the disease, these cells helped create new arteries, thereby improving the survival rate of these mice.
In an interview with the newspaper Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, James Thompson, the senior author of the study, explained the importance of his findings. According to him, the main goal of the team was to use an improved process of cell turnover for the formation of functional arteries, which can therefore be used in cardiovascular surgery. This experiment is an important proof that scientists very soon received a reliable resource for functional arterial endothelial cells that help arteries behave and perform like a real thing.
