With only four rooms and around ten ounces of weight, it is the world’s most wondrous building. Once its doors open, it must continue this process of opening and closing, pumping the river of life through the veins. For it to stop is a death sentence to the human host it resides in. The heart, this powerhouse of life, is perhaps the most valued organ in the human body. Not only is it powerful and mighty, it is tuned into the smallest bits of our humanity e.g., the skipping dance it does when we see the face of a certain someone or the racing thuds it pounds to when we are getting ready for a presentation. It is no surprise, then, that scientists have failed to recreate a human heart from scratch. Texas Heart Institute’s director of regenerative medicine research, Doris Taylor has however done something equally impressive, she has succeeded in stripping hearts of all that makes them unique (decellularized them) and used their architecture to recreate a heart capable of pumping in another beings body.

In the United States alone, 3,000 patients are awaiting for a donor heart, nearly 5 million are living with heart failure and there are about 550,000 new cases annually. After twelve years, a heart transplant patient has only a 50 percent chance of surviving. The main reason patients die after a heart transplant is rejection.The immune system does not recognize the foreign cells suddenly invading the body and decides it needs to protect by attacking the transplanted organ. To prevent rejection, endo-myocardial biopsies must be done. These biopsies come with occasional risks such as hepatitis B transmissions, arrhythmias, hematoma, and cardiac perforation. The patients must also take immunosuppressant’s to prevent rejection. The side affects of these medications include hypertension, renal effects, tremor, headaches, glucose intolerance, and metabolic problems. Then there are infections, which are common after organ transplants because of course immunosuppressant’s are meant to prevent the immune system from protecting the body from potentially harmful foreign substances. There are so many problems associated with organ rejection that it can be concluded that finding a way to get rid of the “foreignness” of an organ can substantially increase the life expectancy of a heart transplant patient.

This is exactly what Doris Taylor and her team does when she decellularized rat hearts. First they remove all DNA and intracellular material using detergent solutions and evalu- ate the hearts afterwards to make sure no remaining nuclei remained. Only the structure of the hearts remain. The heart has a white opaque quality resembling a ghost, hence the title “ghost heart”. The hearts are then placed in a bioreactor and injected with cardiac stem cells. By the eight day, the hearts began to contract and show electrical responses. For the first time Dr. Taylor’s team has successfully decellularized a heart and repopulate it with cells from a different individual creating a heart that is capable of pumping.

Dr. Taylor hopes that this recreation of the rat hearts can be extended towards human hearts Such a feat is complex and difficult because of the many arteries and vessels that must be grown to keep the heart alive. Dr. Taylor has succeeded however in recreating a porcine heart proving that this method can be applied to a heart that is almost as complex and large as the human heart. Then there is the main goal of this entire procedure, which is that these hearts will eventually be able to be transplanted into a human being. In an environment other than the human body, such as a bioreactor, the heart is able to pump, but the heart needs to be able to do more than just pump once it is transplanted into a human body. The heart needs to able to work within a whole network of other organs and systems. In order to function like any other heart, these ghost hearts still need more work and experiments need to be done in vivo. Once this procedure has been proven to work in the human body, Dr. Taylor believes that ghost hearts can be extended towards less complex organs such as the lungs and the liver. Once this procedure has been proven to work in the human body, Dr. Taylor believes that ghost hearts can be extended towards less complex organs such as the lungs and the liver.

Such a simple strategy to such a complex problem seems almost ridiculous, yet Dr. Taylor has proven that sometimes the best answers are the simplest ones. Using ghost hearts in heart transplants eliminates the chance of rejection in heart transplant patients. This will greatly increase their survival rate and relieve the pain and suffering they endured as a result of immunosuppressants. Ghost heart transplantation is a simple idea that will revolutionize current heart transplant methods. 

References

Bianco, Carl. “How Your Heart Works” 01 April 2000. HowStuffWorks. com. <http://health.howstuffworks.com/human-body/systems/ circulatory/heart.htm> 17 November 2014.