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Medicine: Cardiac patients in Britain may soon be getting replacement heart valves grown from their own adult stem cells. You may not have heard about this miracle on the evening news. Few people read the British journal Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society, but the current issue contains details of the research by a British research team led by Sir Magdi Yacoub that may end the scourge of heart disease as we know it. In April we wrote about research led by Yacoub, who's been called the world's leading heart surgeon. His team had managed in the laboratory to grow...

CHICAGO Nov 15, 2006 (AP)-Scientists for the first time have grown human heart valves using stem cells from the fluid that cushions babies in the womb offering a revolutionary approach that may be used to repair defective hearts in the future.The idea is to create these new valves in the lab while the pregnancy progresses and have them rady to implant in a baby with heart defects after it is born.

News Release 11.14.06A Abstract 1064/B17 CHICAGO, Nov. 14 -- For the first time, researchers have successfully used a rabbit's cells to grow heart-valve-shaped tissue inside the animal's body, according to research reported at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2006. The process may someday make it possible to grow rejection-proof replacement valves for humans using a person's own cells, a process called autologous tissue engineering. "It's the first fabrication of an autologous heart valve inside a living body," said Kyoko Hayashida, M.D., lead author of the study and a research fellow at the National Cardiovascular Center Research Institute in Osaka,...