Paging Doctor Frankenstein

As the AFP report puts it, this would make the fictional Dr. Frankenstein quite jealous. American researchers have essentially made a brand new animal heart out of the stripped down remains of a once living heart. And they have made that sucker beat as well.

If extended to humans, the procedure could provide an almost limitless supply of hearts, and possibly other organs, to millions of terminally ill people waiting helplessly for a new lease on life.

Approximately 50,000 patients in the United States alone die every year for lack of a donor heart, and some 22 million people worldwide are living with the threat of heart failure.

"The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells," said lead researcher Doris Taylor, director of the Center or Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota.

While there have been advances in generating living heart tissue in the lab, this is the first time an entire, three-dimension bio-artificial heart has been brought to life.

The core procedure making this possible is called decellularisation.

In this process, all the cells from an organ — in this case the heart of a dead rat — are stripped away using powerful detergents, leaving only a bleached-white scaffolding composed of proteins secreted by the cells.

In the experiments, this matrix was then injected with a mixture of cells taken from newborn rat hearts and placed in a sterile lab setting, where the scientists hoped it would grow.

After only four days, contractions started, and on the eighth day, the hearts were pumping, according to the study, published in the British journal Nature Medicine.

It is a long first step toward truly cloned organs, from the sound of it. If they can get to that point, there would theoretically be no chance of organ rejection. This is only a first step, the new heart only worked at about 2% of the efficiency of a normal rat heart. But it is a step in in interesting direction.