Heart muscle doesn’t regenerate when it’s damaged, one reason heart attacks are so debilitating. A dream of researchers is to build new heart muscle using transplanted cardiac stem cells. Scientists at the University of Washington have taken a potentially important step in that direction, using embryonic stem cells as their starting material.
Scientists haven’t made much progress obtaining cardiac stem cells that would make the heart cells they would like to see at work. So Charles Murry and his colleagues at the University of Washington have been using embryonic stem cells, which retain the potential to turn into any tissue type in the body.
Read the full story at NPR.