The Beat Goes On
Hearts built to order may be just around the corner.
By Day Greenberg.
A dead heart beats again, thanks to the efforts of scientists at the University of Minnesota. To rebuild and reanimate the organ, which was harvested from a rat, scientists first stripped the old heart cells away with a detergent typically found in shampoos. That left behind a collagen matrix - the protein fibers that hold groups of cells together and help give organs their overall shape - which they then reseeded with heart cells from a newborn rat.
They attached the organ to electrodes and waited. Then it happened: The heart started to beat regularly. "We were all running around like crazy, scared that it would [just stop and] never beat again", says team member Harald Ott, a surgical resident at Massachusetts General Hopspital in Boston.
The reanimation technique is now being tested on pig hearts, which are much closer in structure to human hearts than are rat hearts. Organs from built-to-order collagen matrices could help treat the five million Americans who suffer from heart failure and the some 2,600 patients currently wiating for transplant donors.
Guess who's been pouring over their latest copy of PopSci magazine for game ideas
What this technique could mean for organ transplants is quite simple but quite enormous in impact, - a spare organ, preformed from collagen, reseeded from your own cells means much lower risk (if any at all) of organ rejection, near instant type matching and no delays waiting for the organ to be delivered from a donor who could be half a continent away.
For the game it means you could literally walk into a body bank and select a "pre-organ" then get it reseeded with your own cells and get it surgically fitted within days maybe even hours. A nice alternative to making a Player keep their PC out of the game for weeks/months until they're fully healed.
Cheers,
Kevin
