Scientists from the University of Minnesota Center for Cardiovascular Repair grew functioning heart tissue by taking dead rat and pig hearts and reseeding them with a mixture of live cells.

Decellularization is the process of removing all of the cells from an organ -- in this case an animal cadaver heart -- leaving only the extracellular matrix, the framework between the cells, intact.

Principal investigator Doris Taylor, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair, said after successfully removing all of the cells from both rat and pig hearts, researchers injected them with a mixture of progenitor cells that came from neonatal or newborn rat hearts and placed the structure in a sterile setting in the lab to grow.

"The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells," Taylor said in a statement.

The findings are published online in the journal Nature Medicine.