Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers have taken some initial steps toward the creation of bioengineered human hearts using donor hearts stripped of components that would generate an immune response and cardiac muscle cells generated from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which could come from a potential recipient. The investigators described their accomplishments – which include developing an automated bioreactor system capable of supporting a whole human heart during the recellularization process — earlier this year in Circulation Research.
“Generating functional cardiac tissue involves meeting several challenges,” says Jacques Guyette, PhD, of the MGH Center for Regenerative Medicine (CRM), lead author of the report. “These include providing a structural scaffold that is able to support cardiac function, a supply of specialized cardiac cells, and a supportive environment in which cells can repopulate the scaffold to form mature tissue capable of handling complex cardiac functions.”
The research team is led by Harald Ott, MD, of the MGH CRM and the Department of Surgery, senior author of the paper. In 2008, Ott developed a procedure for stripping the living cells from a donor organ with a detergent solution and then repopulating the remaining extracellular matrix scaffold with organ-appropriate types of cells. Since then his team has used the approach to generate functional rat kidneys and lungs and has decellularized large-animal hearts, lungs and kidneys. This report is the first to conduct a detailed analysis of the matrix scaffold remaining after decellularization of whole human hearts, along with recellularization of the cardiac matrix in three-dimensional and whole-heart formats.