Cardiac Tissue

Because drugs can only slow the pace of heart failure and also because transplantable hearts are in short supply, myocardial tissue engineering holds such great promise.  Researchers at the Xijing Hospital (in Xi’an, capital of Shaanxi Province, south central China) have used polylactic acid to create a scaffolding onto which they seeded bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells. After incubating those cells on the scaffold, they surgically implanted them in rats and found that they functioned properly.  MORE

Image Credit:  http://bioweb.uwlax.edu/APlab/Index.htm