Scientists create living heart for dead rat

HEARTY NEWS: The day may not be far when scientists will be able to create human hearts for transplant.

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New York: Scientists in the US have created an artificial rat heart using the cells of baby rats.

The breakthrough by researchers at the University of Minnesota offers hope that the day is not far when scientists will be able to create human hearts for transplant.

The researchers removed all the cells from a dead rat heart, leaving the valves and outer structure as scaffolding for new heart cells injected from newborn rats.

Within two weeks, the cells formed a new beating heart that conducted electrical impulses and pumped a small amount of blood, reported the online edition of The New York Times.

The scientists said that with modifications, they should be able to grow a human heart by taking stem cells from a patient's bone marrow and placing them in a cadaver heart that has been prepared as a scaffold.

The early success "opens the door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas - you name it and we hope we can make it", lead researcher Doris A Taylor said.