Stem cells could fix broken hearts

In a study scientists used stem cells to re-grow damaged heart muscle. In the 17 patients who received the therapy an average 50 per cent reduction was measured in the size of the damaged tissue.
WHEN a piece of muscle in a person's heart dies from lack of blood flow, it scars over and is lost.
Eduardo Marban and his team from the Cedars Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles has proven that those muscles may not necessarily be gone forever.
"One of the holy grails in medicine has been the use of medicine to achieve regeneration," he said. "Patients that were treated not only experienced shrinkage of their scars, but also new growth of their heart muscle, which is very exciting."
The better part of the research is that the stem cells were not derived from embryos, but instead were developed from the patients' own hearts. Mr Marban's team inserted a catheter into the diseased hearts and took a small biopsy of muscle. In the laboratory, the tissue was manipulated into producing stem cells to re-inject into the patients' hearts.