Tag Archives: American Heart Association

BioEngineers turn “ON” The Unexcitable Cells

By altering the genetic makeup of normally “unexcitable” cells, Duke University bioengineers have turned them into cells capable of generating and passing electrical current.

This proof-of-concept advance could have broad implications in treating diseases of the nervous system or the heart, since these tissues rely on cells with the ability to communicate with adjacent cells in order to function properly. This communication is achieved through the passage of electrical impulses, known as action potentials, from cell to cell.

Biomedical Engineers make Blood vessels in Lab using Skin cells

If you are on dialysis like approximately 400,000 other Americans, then your life could change for the better in the next couple of years thanks to some new biomedical engineering.

The technology, announced this week at an American Heart Association conference on emerging technology, enables engineers to grow sheets of human cells in a laboratory, and then synthesize them into tubes, mimicking human blood vessels. Alternatively, the human cells, which come from skin cells, can be made into threads and then woven into the form of blood vessels.

Heart can be Regenerated Using Stem cells of Damaged Heart in Children

Diseases and conditions where stem cell treatm...
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Visionaries in the field of cardiac therapeutics have long looked to the future when a damaged heart could be rebuilt or repaired by using one’s own heart cells. A study published in the February issue of Circulation, a scientific journal of the American Heart Association, shows that heart stem cells from children with congenital heart disease were able to rebuild the damaged heart in the laboratory.