A FATTY apron of tissue called the omentum, which sits over the stomach and intestines, may be the perfect spot to grow patches of cells for heart repair.
Heart attacks can cause permanent damage to heart tissue. In theory, tissue grown in the lab can repair the damage, but this doesn’t always integrate well into the body.
To solve this problem, , a tissue engineer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel, and colleagues seeded rat cardiac cells onto scaffolds which they transplanted into the omentums of eight rats. After a week of growth, they transplanted the patches of heart tissue into the damaged hearts of another set of rats. The patches integrated well with existing heart cells and beat in time, unlike patches grown in the lab (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ).
Advertisement
The team attributes the success to the omentum-grown cells developing a denser, more mature set of blood vessels. The same trick might one day also work in people, although some might object to having two transplants.
