Regenerative Medicine In Brendan Maher's How To Build A Heart

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1. Brendan Maher, in his article “How to Build a Heart” discusses doctor’s and engineer’s research and experimentation into the field of regenerative medicine. Maher talks about several different researchers in this fields. One is Doris Taylor, the director of regenerative medicine at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston. Her job includes harvesting organs such as hearts and lungs and re-engineering them starting with the cells. She attempts to bring the back to life in order to be used for people who are on transplant waiting lists. She hopes to be able to make the number of people waiting for transplants diminish with her research but it is a very difficult process. Maher says that researchers have had some successes when it comes to rebuilding organs but only with simples ones such as a bladder. A heart is much more complicated and requires many more cells to do all the functions it needs to. New organs have to be able to do several things in order for them to be used in humans that are still alive. They need to be sterile, able to grow, able to repair themselves, and work. Taylor has led some of the first successful experiments to build rat hearts and is hopeful of a good outcome with tissue rebuilding and engineering. Scientists have been able to make beating heart cells in a petri dish but the main issue now is developing a scaffold for these cells so that they can form in three dimension. Harold Ott, a surgeon from Massachusetts General Hospital and studied under Taylor, has a method that he developed while training. Detergent is pumped into a glass chamber where a heart is suspended and this detergent strips away everything except a layer of collagen, laminins, and other proteins. The hard part according to Ott is making s...

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3. The most interesting part of this article for me was learning that researchers and surgeons have already developed so much information on regenerative medicine. I had no idea that simple organs such as bladders and tracheas were already being rebuilt and put into humans. This field is very interesting to me and it seems like difficult work but I think that everything that comes out of it will be helpful to the medical field and human health. The way they are able to take something as small as a cell and turn it into a functioning organ is surprising to me. I knew about the growing list of people who need some type of transplant and the fact that researchers are looking for a way to diminish this list is amazing. It seems to be a growing field of study and I hope that many bright researchers join this study of the human heart and regenerative medicine.

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