'Ghost heart,' a framework for growing new human hearts, could be answer for thousands waiting for new heart

Plain Dealer | Diane Suchekta


Courtesy of Doris TaylorThis ghost heart is ready to be injected with a transplant recipient's stem cells so a new heart -- one that won't be rejected -- can be grown.
The problem: More than 3,200 people are on the waiting list for a heart transplant in the United States. Some won't survive the wait. Last year, 340 died before a new heart was found.

The solution: Take a pig heart, soak it in an ingredient commonly found in shampoo and wash away the cells until you're left with a protein scaffold that is to a heart what two-by-four framing is to a house.

Then inject that ghost heart, as it's called, with hundreds of millions of blood or bone-marrow stem cells from a person who needs a heart transplant, place it in a bioreactor -- a box with artificial lungs and tubes that pump oxygen and blood into it -- and wait as the ghost heart begins to mature into a new, beating human heart.

Doris Taylor, director of regenerative medicine research at the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital in Houston, has been working on this -- first using rat hearts, then pig hearts and human hearts -- for years.

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