From skin to heart

Alert from AMICOR Jorge Ossanai

Scientists Turn Human Skin Cells Into Healthy Heart Cells

By ALEXANDRA SIFFERLIN | @acsifferlin | May 23, 2012 | 

DR. JOHN D. CUNNINGHAM / GETTY IMAGES

In a medical first, scientists in Haifa, Israel, took skin cells from two heart failure patients and reprogrammed them into stem cells that generated healthy, beating heart muscle cells in the lab. Though human testing is likely a decade off, the hope is that such cells can be used to help people with heart failure repair their damaged hearts with their own skin cells.

In the current study, scientists first mixed the newly developed heart cells with pre-existing heart tissue — within days, the cells were beating together. The heart tissue was then transplanted into rats, where it integrated with the rats’ healthy heart cells.

“What is new and exciting about our research is that we have shown that it’s possible to take skin cells from an elderly patient with advanced heart failure and end up with his own beating cells in a laboratory dish that are healthy and young — the equivalent to the stage of his heart cells when he was just born,” says lead researcher Dr. Lior Gepstein, a senior clinical electrophysiologist at Rambam Medical Center in Israel, said in a statement./.../