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A research team found that a subset of artificial heart patients can regenerate heart muscle, which may open the door to new ways to treat and perhaps someday cure heart failure. There is no cure for heart failure, though medications can slow its progression. The only treatment for advanced heart failure, other than a transplant, is pump replacement through an artificial heart, called a left ventricular assist device. Said Hesham Sadek, MD, Ph.D., "When a heart muscle is injured, it doesn't grow back. We have nothing to reverse heart muscle loss." Sadek led a collaboration between international experts to investigate...

Dr. Denton Cooley, a Houston native and a pioneer of heart transplants, died Friday. He was 96. Born in 1920, Cooley graduated with highest honors from the University of Texas Austin and earned his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1944. Cooley performed the first transplant of a human heart in the United States in 1968. The following year, he became the first surgeon to implant an artificial heart in a human.

Comments (3)Jack is the youngest person to have been on an artifical heart for so long A baby boy who survived a record 120 days connected to an artificial heart outside his body has come home from hospital. In March, doctors told eight-month-old Jack Vellam's parents he was so ill from an inflammation of the heart muscle that there was nothing more they could do for him. Reluctantly, the couple agreed to turn off their son's life-support machine. They said their goodbyes and had him christened. But five hours later, Danielle Hastings, 18, and Terry Vellam, 21, changed their...