It is also evaluating their use to repair cartilage and heart tissue in animals.
This effect is assumed to be related to activation of the serotonin 2B receptor on heart tissue.
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"It's a very dramatic effect, " says Lefer, who envisions a new generation of heart tissue preserving drugs.
Catheters can contain tools to vaporize or "ablate" bits of heart tissue that cause abnormal signals that control the heartbeat.
The procedure to remove leads, which can tear heart tissue or leave broken pieces of the wire inside veins, is controversial.
It's incredibly exciting, the idea that we might actually take these cells, for example, to develop some heart tissue, inject some of those cells into a heart that has been damaged and restore some of the function of that heart.
Defibrillator leads are often bound to the walls of veins and the heart by scar tissue, an obstacle that worsens with time.
He and his team already have grown early-stage valves and patches that could be used some day to repair tissue damaged by heart attack.
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But ATS should soon have products on the market that smooth wrinkles, heal intractable wounds, and even mend cardiac tissue damaged by heart attacks.
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Fibrosis is an underhanded villain, scarring the tissue of the heart, lungs, kidneys or limbs with uncontrolled production of the body's own healing agents.
But a study at the University of Arizona found that the material has an even more dramatic use: It can heal cardiac tissue damaged by heart attacks.
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Osiris Therapeutics of Baltimore has several trials under way using adult stem cells to treat the intestinal inflammation known as Crohn's disease, repair damaged tissue following a heart attack and prevent the progression of arthritis.
Fast-forward a couple more years and Deepak Srivastava, a scientist at the Gladstone Institute in San Francisco, found his own three-gene recipe for turning the plentiful, plebian cells that form connective tissue in the heart directly into cardiomyocytes, the cells that make the heart beat and are damaged by heart attacks.
Normally, orderly waves of electric activity pass through the cardiac tissue, causing the heart muscle to contract.
Then he showed that tissue from failing hearts contains far more TNF than healthy hearts do, suggesting it may degrade the fibrous tissue that holds the heart together.
The long-term hope is to treat patients with some sort of stem cell that could turn into beating heart muscle and replace dead cardiac tissue with fully functioning new cells.
There is also a significant risk of damage to the heart, which is made of muscle tissue.
Sapien made of coiled steel, like the stents used to prop open clogged heart arteries, and flaps of cow tissue.
Caspase-blockers may limit collateral tissue damage from strokes, heart attacks or liver disease, and Vertex hopes to begin human trials of at least one compound next year.
This, too, is significant because the "scarring" tissue that naturally forms after a heart attack is thin and can get stretched in ways that alter the shape of the heart.
This chemical cascade, called the Wnt pathway, is turned on when organisms are injured, and it could in theory be used to make stem cells that are already present in the heart, brain and other organs regenerate damaged tissue.
Mr Smith said surgeons found an additional heart defect during the operation - a 'shelf' of tissue which had to be removed.
For regeneration to continue, stem cells from both the bone marrow and the heart itself must be coaxed to grow a second layer of tissue that is necessary for the formation of arteries, which are bigger and thicker than capillaries.
In MPS I, a buildup of certain compounds in connective tissue leads to frequent infections, joint deformities and impaired heart function.
For now, treatment of strokes is pretty much limited to Genentech's clot-busting drug, Activase, a tissue plasminogen activator, which is primarily used to treat heart attacks.
This damages the tissue around it and generates chaotic electrical activity across the whole heart.
An interesting aspect of the Carmat heart is a so-called biomembrane, which helps avoid clots by using tissue derived from animals.
New catheter-based imagers aim to improve IVUS by letting doctors distinguish stable plaque, safely ensconced in scar tissue, from the inflamed plaque that is more likely to rupture and trigger a heart attack.
New research shows that sticking to the Mediterranean diet, previously shown to reduce heart and other health issues, also may help lower the risk of having small areas of dead tissue linked to thinking problems.
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Advanced Tissue Sciences, an American biotechnology company, claimed it would soon be able to grow a human heart in the laboratory .
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