Scientists develop 'universal' virus-free method to turn blood cells into 'beating' heart cells

Johns Hopkins scientists have developed a simplified, cheaper, all-purpose method they say can be used by scientists around the globe to more safely turn blood cells into heart cells. The method is virus-free and produces heart cells that beat with nearly 100 percent efficiency, they claim. "We took the recipe for this process from a complex minestrone to a simple miso soup," says Elias Zambidis, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of oncology and pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering and the Kimmel Cancer Center. Zambidis says, "many scientists previously thought that a nonviral method of inducing blood cells to turn into highly functioning cardiac cells was not within reach, but "we've found a way to do it very efficiently and we want other scientists to test the method in their own labs." However, he cautions that the cells are not yet ready for human testing

Process for expansion and division of heart cells identified

"Researchers at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease (GICD) and the University of California, San Francisco have unraveled a complex signaling process that reveals how different types of cells interact to create a heart. It has long been known that heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) actively divide and expand in the embryo, but after birth this proliferative capacity is permanently lost. How this transition occurs has not been known. In the current issue of the journal Developmental Cell, the scientists show that the secret to this switch lies in the cells that surround the muscle cells, known as fibroblasts, which send signals that tell cardiomyocytes to divide or get bigger in size. Manipulation of these signals may be able to induce cardiomyocytes to divide again for regenerative purposes after heart attacks" - GEN