TISSUE from infants鈥� own hearts could be cultured and used to permanently
repair their congenital heart defects, say Canadian researchers.
When babies are born with holes in the septum鈥攖he partition that
separates the two sides of the heart鈥攕urgeons use artificial polymers to
patch the holes. But the polymers don鈥檛 grow with the body, so at some point the
children will need a second operation.
Now Ren-Ke Li and his colleagues at the Toronto General Hospital in Ontario
have shown that they can take human heart cells and grow them on a
three-dimensional mesh platform. The mesh slowly dissolves, leaving the tissue
graft behind (The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, vol
119, p 368). Li believes that if he can take a sample from a patient and culture
the cells, the resulting graft should grow with the patient鈥檚 body.
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