“It is hard to mend a broken heart, but in a few years doctors might be able to do essentially that,” reports the Wall Street Journal. Scientists are developing ways to help people
grow new heart muscle after a heart attack, as well as new lung tissue to treat fibrosis, corneas to erase eye pain and other body parts to gain a new chance at life. If the science works, it could represent a new approach to medicine: reversing rather than alleviating chronic illnesses…..The need for regenerated hearts alone is huge. Up to 3% of the world’s population suffers from heart failure, in which a heart whose muscle has been damaged by a heart attack or another disease gradually loses its ability to pump blood. The condition affects about 6.5 million people in the U.S. and is the leading cause of hospitalization among Medicare patients.
Certain salamanders and zebrafish can regenerate their hearts, along with limbs and other organs. Humans have only a limited capacity to regenerate, with skin and the liver as the main examples…..Scientists are testing different approaches to regenerate the heart. Some, like Murry, are working with stem cells. Others are working on stimulating existing heart-muscle cells—those that survive a heart attack—to proliferate. One billion heart-muscle cells—about 25% of muscle cells in the left ventricle—can die as a result of a major heart attack, when blood flow to the heart muscle is abruptly cut off, says Dr. Mauro Giacca…Giacca is developing a therapeutic that uses microRNA, molecules that help regulate how genes are expressed, to induce surviving cardiac cells to multiply.
Scripps Research scientists are working on a drug to grow new heart muscle from surviving heart-muscle cells. It targets proteins that activate cell growth and control the size of the organ, so that new cells form but proliferation stops before the heart gets too big…After a heart attack, the immune system clears out dead heart-muscle cells, leaving gaps that are normally filled with scar tissue. The drug, in a hydrogel form, would be injected into the sac that surrounds the heart and slowly bathe the damaged area for a week, instructing the surviving cells to multiply and fill in the gaps….The drug restored heart-pumping capacity almost back to normal in mice and pigs, according to Scripps [which] aims to begin testing the drug in humans in early 2026.
More at this link.
In another scientific advance that could help people who need organ transplants, a patient was recently given a 3D-printed windpipe, using an organ shaped by a 3D-printer: “The patient’s new organ is built with cartilage and mucosal lining (the moist lining that you get in some of your organs and body cavities like your lungs and nose). The scientists obtained nasal stem cells and cartilage cells from other patients to create these elements – cells which were discarded during a procedure to treat nasal congestion and from a nasal septum surgery. But the 3D-printed windpipe also contains polycaprolactone (PCL) for structural support, as well as bio-ink. Rather than the ink you might see in your printer at home, bio-ink carries the living cells needed to create living tissue in 3D-bioprinting.”
Scientists are also working on turning spleens into functioning livers for people with liver damage.
A gene-edited kidney transplant allowed a monkey to survive for two years, a scientific advance that could be used in the future to help increase the supply of kidneys for people who currently can’t get one. Earlier, the New York Post wrote about “How pigs will save thousands of human lives through organ transplants.” Last January, David Bennett, a 57-year-old man with end-stage heart disease, received a genetically modified pig heart at the University of Maryland Medical Center. The cost of a heart transplant in the US was around $1.66 million in 2022, while pig transplants cost less, about $500,000. Even without genetic modifications, a pig kidney worked for a month in a brain-dead man it was transplanted into.
Scientists have also developed tiny robots made of human cells to repair damaged cells. Nanorobots are also being used to fight cancer. “In a major advancement in nanomedicine, Arizona State University scientists…have successfully programmed nanorobots to shrink tumors by cutting off their blood supply,” reported Next Big Future.
Last year, doctors used a surgical robot to carry out incredibly complicated spinal surgery. They also did the first robotic liver transplant in America.
