Often, when pigs die, they are sent to someone’s dinner table, but if one Houston researcher is successful, pigs will have another way to give life to humans. The Texas Heart Institute’s Doris Taylor thinks she’s figured out how to turn a pig heart into a human heart, The Houston Chronicle reports.
It takes about two days for a mild detergent also used in baby shampoo to clean a pig heart of all of its pig cells. This process leaves behind an eerie, white heart-shaped “scaffold,” which can then be filled with human stem cells, immature cells found in our organs and tissues. The stem cells grow until they fill out the scaffold, then a blood supply is introduced, bringing the new, and now human, heart to life.
Taylor said she hopes her team can bring an in-human study of bio-artificial hearts to the Food and Drug Administration in the next two years. Read more here.