HAIFA, Israel, Jan. 22 (UPI) -- Israeli medical researchers say they have successfully created new heart muscle with its own blood supply by using human embryonic stem cells.
The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology scientists say they expect such vascularization to improve the survival of the tissue when transplanted into a human heart damaged by heart attack.
Professors Shulamit Levenberg and Lior Gepstein say the achievement marks the first time three-dimensional human cardiac tissue complete with blood vessels has been constructed.
The researchers said they engineered the heart muscle by seeding a sponge-like, three-dimensional plastic scaffold with heart muscle cells and blood vessel cells produced by human embryonic stem cells, along with cells called embryonic fibroblasts.
Levenberg's research team used a similar technique in 2005 to grow skeletal muscle and she says the lessons learned from that study helped in designing the heart muscle.
The new research appears online in the journal Circulation Research.
