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2006 DEC 4 - (NewsRx.com) -- Johns Hopkins scientists have successfully grown large numbers of stem cells taken from adult pigs' healthy heart tissue and used the cells to repair some of the tissue damage done to those organs by lab-induced heart attacks. Pigs' hearts closely resemble those in humans, making them a useful model in such research. Following up on previous studies, Hopkins cardiologists used a thin tube to extract samples of heart tissue no bigger than a grain of rice within hours of the animals' heart attacks, then grew large numbers of cardiac stem cells in the lab...

Xabier López Aranguren, a biologist and biochemist at the University of Navarra, has studied in his doctoral dissertation the use of adult stem cells in order to palliate damage to the tissues affected by cardiovascular diseases, which are one of the leading causes of death in the Western world. The results of his research have recently been published in the journal Blood. In these ailments, there is tissue death. The tissues cease to function because they do not receive sufficient oxygen or nutrients via the arteries. In his study he has identified “how adult stem cells can correct this damage,...

Researchers at the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation have launched a study to examine whether administration of stem cells to first time heart attack patients can prevent the development of congestive heart failure (CHF). CHF diagnosis is the cause of hospitalization in the United States and is responsible for more than 50,000 deaths a year. Currently, heart transplantation is the only available cure.  Each year more than one million Americans have their first heart attack, putting them at risk of developing CHF as a result of cardiac cell death and scar formation which results in diminished pumping ability of the heart...

(BETHESDA, MD) – Left ventricular function and exercise capacity increased, while the area of heart muscle damage shrank, in 18 patients given infusions of their own bone marrow stem cells up to eight years after a heart attack, according to a new study in the Nov. 1, 2005, issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. "This new therapy is able to treat until now irreversible heart complaints and function disturbances in patients with chronic coronary artery disease after myocardial infarction, even many years after heart attack. Therefore there is hope for this large amount of patients with...

Embryonic stem cells have not cured or successfully treated a single patient. Contrast that with the more than 70 conditions that are treatable using non-embryonic stem cell therapies. One of the hottest debates in bioethics today surrounds research using stem cells taken from either in vitro fertilization or cloned human embryos. From state legislatures and the halls of Congress to the United Nation, the controversy over whether to ban (or fund) such research rages. Human cloning for embryonic stem cell research creates human embryos virtually identical to a patient’s genetic composition. The embryo’s stem cells are then harvested — a...