(CBS News) A new study of patients with heart failure found a novel treatment approach might reverse the damage that has long been considered irreversible: Fixing their damaged hearts using stem cells derived by their own skin cells.

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In what scientists are calling a first, skin cells were taken from heart failure patients and transformed into stem cells, which were then turned into heart muscle cells capable of beating - albeit in a petri dish.

The treatment approach has scientists buzzing because it avoids the risk of possible immune system rejection from transplanting "foreign" stem cells, since the cells came from patients' own bodies.

"What is new and exciting about our research is that we have shown that it's possible to take skin cells from an elderly patient with advanced heart failure and end up with his own beating cells in a laboratory dish that are healthy and young - the equivalent to the stage of his heart cells when he was just born," the study's author Professor Lior Gepstein, professor of cardiology and physiology at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, said in a news release.

Just how do skin cells become heart cells? Researchers took skin cells from two male patients with heart failure, a 51 and 61-year-old, and genetically reprogrammed them by injecting a cocktail of "transcription factors" and a virus into the nucleus of the skin cell, followed by removing the virus and transcription factors that have been linked to cancerous tumor growth. The goal was to reprogram the cells into human-induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) that could help repair hearts.

"One of the obstacles to using hiPSCs clinically in humans is the potential for the cells to develop out of control and become tumours," explained Prof Gepstein in using the technique.

Once in stem cell-form, the cells differentiated in a petri dish to become heart muscle cells called cardiomyocytes, which the researchers then combined with heart tissue and cultured them into healthy heart muscle tissue. Within 48 hours, the tissues were beating together.

"The tissue was behaving like a tiny microscopic cardiac tissue comprised of approximately 1000 cells in each beating area," Gepstein said in a statement.

The researchers then transplanted the new human tissue into rats, finding it grafted to the rat's host cardiac tissues. Their research is published in the May 22 issue of the European Heart Journal.

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Skin cells transformed into beating heart tissue, fueling heart failure treatment hopes

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