Promising news for patients with damaged heart muscles. Here is a Five Question Interview with Nenad Bursac from the Duke University Biomedical Engineering Department. Of particular note:

Patient’s own heart muscle cells will generally not divide in a sufficient number to replace the damaged part of the muscle. And if we took a larger part of the patient’s own heart muscle we would make more damage in another area, and things would only become worse. Therefore, we need an external and abundant source of cells for heart muscle repair, and a lot of research effort is ongoing to identify what that source could be. Ideally, stem cells have the potential to be this cell source for the repair of heart damage as they can be proliferated in a dish to large quantities and then potentially steered towards becoming heart cells.