A team led by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has generated premature cells that support early heart development but vanish soon after birth. The investigators hope that the advance, which is described in Nature Communications, will help bring them closer to achieving their goal of using patients’ cells to generate functioning heart tissue that could be transplanted, similar to donor organs, for the treatment of heart failure.
The cells, called pre-epicardial cells, form the epicardium, a membrane that covers the outer surface of the heart. This membrane generates a variety of cells needed to support heart development before birth. Harald Ott, MD, a thoracic surgeon at MGH and an associate professor in surgery at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues developed a recipe to generate pre-epicardial cells from human induced pluripotent stem cells, which are embryo-like cells derived from reprogrammed mature cells such as a patient’s skin cells.
