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The heart does have a limited ability to heal itself — and a genetic 'trick' can harness this. Can heart cells renew themselves, and can scientists help them do so? Two papers published online in Nature today suggest that heart muscle cells can make copies of themselves at a very low rate1, but that a genetic trick can prompt them to do a better job2. Those results give hope that hearts damaged by cardiovascular disease — which causes the deaths of almost 17 million people a year — could be coaxed to regenerate themselves. Heart muscle cannot renew itself very...

Cardiomyocytes, the workhorse cells that make up the beating heart, can now be made cheaply and abundantly in the laboratory. Writing this week (May 28, 2012) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of Wisconsin scientists describes a way to transform human stem cells -- both embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells -- into the critical heart muscle cells by simple manipulation of one key developmental pathway. The technique promises a uniform, inexpensive and far more efficient alternative to the complex bath of serum or growth factors now used to nudge blank slate stem cells to...