美国科学家让老鼠心脏“死而复生”

死而复生，这以前听起来只有在科幻小说里面会出现的情节，现在已经越来越（甚至说已经）靠近真实了。

今天的新闻里，一群美国University of Minnesota的研究员上了电视，他们发表的研究成果是：他们让一个已经死掉的老鼠心脏，从新“活”了过来。

CNN新闻上写：

Researchers at the University of Minnesota were able to create a beating heart using the outer structure of one heart and injecting heart cells from another rat.

Their findings are reported in the journal Nature Medicine.

Rather than building a heart from scratch, which has often been mentioned as possible use for stem cells, this procedure takes a heart and breaks it down to the outermost shell. It's similar to taking a house and gutting it, then rebuilding everything inside. In the human version, the patient's own cells would be used.

"We took a rat heart and used soap to wash out the cells of the heart," said Doris Taylor, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair, Medtronic Bakken professor of medicine and physiology and lead author of the study.



下来是一些行内人会看懂的：

The process is called "decelluarization." To do this, Taylor and her team hung up the heart from a dead rat, introduced a regular soap solution into the top of the organ, and let gravity do the work. The soap moved through the heart's blood vessels, dissolving existing cells, which dropped out of the bottom. This process was repeated until only the outermost casing of the heart was left, resulting in a "white, almost gelatin-looking heart," Taylor explained. This would be the equivalent of the gutted house.


用一种实验室“肥皂”来run through这颗老鼠心脏，直到肥皂把里面的血管、细胞都“溶解”掉，留下一个白色的，近乎一个心脏框架的结构。再在这个结构里，注如另外一只新生老鼠的心脏细胞。新注入的细胞慢慢在这个框架里从新“生长”，直到最后变成一颗会跳动的心脏。

The rebuilding started with injecting new heart cells, in this case cells from baby lab rats, and pumping them through the heart. By treating the cells as heart cells would be treated and using a pacemaker to help them learn how to pump, they grew into a heart that could pump -- essentially rebuilding the organ's interior.

据悉，仅美国每年就有近5万人因等不到捐赠的心脏而死亡。科学家们指出，如果能将这种心脏“复活术”成功运用于人类，那么为病人进行移植所需的心脏和其他器官就不再是“一货难求”，许多病人的生命也将得以挽救。

不过这样在实验室里面做出来的心脏，离再造一个操作正常的人类心脏，似乎还有点距离。在in vitro情况下的心脏会跳动，如何放进一个活生生的动物身体，让它在in vivo情形下也能正常跳动？如何让新的心脏跟生物原本的血管连接？甚至如何在活体里面注入细胞？老鼠的心脏跟人类心脏还是有差别的，他们是否能在比较接近人类心脏的猪只心脏上成功重复这样的实验？

这些都是他们需要解决的问题。不管怎样，还是一项振奋人心的新研究成果~

恭喜他们！




Venus