Surgeons will soon be able to literally mend a broken heart using live tissue grown from a patient's very own stem cells, top cardiologists said on September 2.
The whole procedure - harvesting cells from bone marrow, growing tissue, and surgically implanting the heart muscle or valve - could take as little as six weeks and could become routine within three-to-five years, they reported.
Their findings were published in a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B in Britain.
One reason heart attacks are so debilitating, even when they are not fatal, is because the human heart - a massive muscle surrounding four valves controlling the body's blood flow - does not regenerate. Damaged tissue stays damaged.
Most problems occur with age, when the old ticker simply begins to wear out.
"But the highest medical need for tissue-engineered heart valves is in the treatment of congenital heart malformation," which affects nearly one percent of all new-borns, Simon Hoeurstrup, lead author of one of the studies said.