Medicaltalks about 7 years ago

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A ghost heart, or better yet, a decellularized heart!

This is the future of regenerative medicine. Whole heart engineering represents an incredible journey with as final destination the challenging aim to solve end-stage cardiac failure with a biocompatible and living organ equivalent. This is an experimental "ghost heart" which has been decellularized. Decellularization is a tissue engineering technique designed to strip out all the cells from a donor organ, leaving nothing but the connective tissue that used to hold the cells in place. In other words, a technique which aims the substution of artificial scaffolds by decellularized organs. This process is accomplished by circulating detergent-based solutions through the organ walls. Those solutions destroy and remove all the original living cells without affecting the extracellular matrix tissue which, in the end, results in an 'empty' matrix tissue. This scaffold of connective tissue - called a "ghost organ" for its pale and almost translucent appearance - can then be reseeded with a patient's own cells, with the goal of regenerating an organ that can be transplanted into the patient without fear of tissue rejection. This method has to deal with 2 tasks. Achievement of an ideal natural extracellular matrix, endowed with biological activity and biomechanical competence, and the need for a complete removal of endogenous cellular components to avoid inflammatory events, immune rejection, and calcification of the scaffolds. Therefore, the optimization of cell disassembly and extraction has to meet necessarily the minimization of structural and functional impairment.