Dr.DorisTayloris involved in both laboratory and clinical studies using cell therapy to treat disease. Almost5 million Americans are living with heart failure and more than half a million new cases are diagnosed annually. Almost 50,000 people die each year while awaiting a heart transplant and, for a decade or more, only about 2,200 heart transplants have been performed in the entire United States. The need is dwarfed by the availability of donor organs.

This is one of the reasons there is such hope placed in the promising field of regenerative medicine. The groundbreaking work of Dr. Taylor and her team has demonstrated the ability in the lab to strip organs, including the heart, of their cellular make-up leaving a decellularized "scaffold." The heartcan then be re-seeded with cells that, when supplied with blood and oxygen, regenerate the scaffold into a functioning heart. Dr. Taylor calls this using nature's platform to create a bioartificial heart.

The hope is that this research is an early step toward being able to grow a fully functional human heart in the laboratory. Dr. Taylor has demonstrated that the process works for other organs as well, such as kidney, pancreas, lung, and liver where she has already tested the same approachopening a door in the field of organ transplantation.

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About Regenerative Medicine Research at the Texas Heart ...

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