January 15, 2008--For the Heart of a Rat

Doesn’t this sound like a potential medical miracle—University of Minnesota researchers reported recently that they had successfully created a “living” rat heart in a laboratory?

This might not at first glance sound like a big deal but scientists not involved with the work in Minnesota say that it may turn out to be a “landmark achievement” since it suggests it might be possible, as a next step, to do the same thing with a pig heart which would then be of great significance since a porcine heat is closest in anatomical terms to a human heart. (See NY Times article linked below.)

In other words if Dr. Doris Taylor and her team can create a beating pig heart from a cadaver pig heart and then do this with a cadaver human heart and after that with other human organs . . . . Need I say more?

Here’s how it works:

Key to “creating’” new organs in a dish, so to speak, is a daunting challenge that needs to be surmounted--organs are three-dimensional. You can generate various organ cells from stem cells (taken from one’s bone marrow, thank you President Bush), but these do not then form themselves into an armature or scaffold, Dr. Taylor’s way of describing this, that represents the three-dimensional structure characteristic of all organs.

To deal with this obstacle, Dr. Taylor, following up on what she calls her “crazy idea,” thought about using the inner, supportive structure of a dead rat’s heart to serve as her scaffold. After cleaning it, literally with a laundry detergent, she took some heart cells from a young live rat and injected them into the armature. She next electrically stimulated the heart-to-be to help the injected cells mature. Which they did.

And when she transplanted this now living heart into the abdomen of a live rat, it was not rejected and soon grew blood vessels and began to beat. In effect, it came alive.

Remarkable and encouraging as this is we will not see any ads during the Super Bowl for these new hearts. We’ll have to be content to live for a while with those for Cialis.

Because, first, Dr. Taylor will have to proceed to her work with pigs; and if that is successful, as many suspect it will be, it will then be time to move on to humans. All told, it is estimated that this will take 10 years; and of course there is no certainty that the ultimate goal, using this method, will work.

Everything sounds promising. Except the 10-years part.

Why, if this is potentially such a breakthrough (and recall non-involved scientists feel all other organs might one day be created this way) why will it take 10 years? Anti-FDA types will blame it on their tortuous system for evaluating and approving new medical procedures. Some may believe that insurance companies might have some unfathomable objections

In addition, I suspect it will take this long for at least two, to me unacceptable, reasons: there will be a problem securing sufficient funding to turn this into a research campaign of the scale required to move it along as expeditiously as its significance suggests it deserves; and, second, as is often the case with medical research, the scientist who makes the initial breakthrough has proprietary rights to control the direction and pace of the research.

In this situation, I hope Dr. Taylor is not that sort of researcher and will both allow and help many others to become involved and that the funds will somehow be found to fast-track this. Millions awaiting organs are waiting.