Call it ‘a landmark achievement’ or a ‘stunning advance’, however, you can’t refute that the new development, occurred on the health front, is no less than a science fiction coming true. Hats off to the laborious task carried out by the experts at the University of Minnesota resulting in a beating rat heart, developed in a laboratory.
In the chase to produce a beating heart, experts used decellularization process for washing away existing cells from the hearts of dead rats while leaving the basic collagen structure intact.This gelatin-like scaffold was left in the laboratory to grow after it was injected with nutrient-rich solution; including heart-cells form newborn rats. During this process pacemaker was also used to coordinate the contraction and just eight days after the heart started to pump, leaving all the experts agape.
No doubt, experts are very hopeful regarding their new achievement; still, they are in no hurry to let their findings go haywire due to excessive response that it has got worldwide. And this is the result why they believe that it’s just a small step taken in their way to achieve the final goal - developing a heart that could be replaced with a dying one.This could be marked a major achievement against serious heart problems, including heart attack that kills around 5 million people annually, with 550,000 new cases diagnosed each year in the United States alone.
