for a rat... Heart Disease as defined by the National Institute of Health, "impairs the heart's ability to pump blood and sustain the body's organs and tissues," and therefore it's not something to be taken lightly.
Still, even though embryonic stem cells have proven to repair heart damage for rats, scientists are facing many critical challenges getting these cells to work with humans. Some of the issues include the creation of enough new heart cells, making sure transplanted heart cells are not contaminated with immature or other cell types, and ensuring the heart cells' survival after transplantation; some of these issues are also common among other medical transplants.
As a solution to their problems, scientists are creating new techniques to generate large numbers of pure cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells) from human embryonic stem cells abbreviated by(hESCs). Additonally, scientists are forming stem cell cocktails to prevent the deaths of stem cells after they are transplanted.
To digress slightly, after the scientists transplanted the stem cells, they induced the rats with heart attacks to examine the results. They found that cardiomyocytes were being supported by rat blood vessels in the treated rat hearts. The treated rat hearts also demonstrated an improved ability to pump blood.
Too bad we're not rats.
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1 comment:
Yes, too bad we are not haha. Its such a shame that even if we have the means to improve our own lives using stem cell research, we are prohibited from doing because of how controversial it is.
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