Engineering cardiac muscle: new ways to refurbish old hearts?

Engineering cardiac muscle: new ways to refurbish old hearts?

Myocardial infarction leads to irreversible cell loss and scar formation, which result in impaired cardiac function, cardiac hypertrophy and, eventually, heart failure. As the intrinsic regenerative capacity of the human heart is very limited, organ transplantation or ventricular assist devices remain the only end-stage therapy options to date. For at least two decades, alternative therapeutic ...

New ways to keep old promises in health care.

New Ways to Make Old Walls: Bacterial Surprises

Two papers in this issue of Cell (Paradis-Bleau et al., 2010 and Typas et al., 2010) report that the lipoproteins LpoA and LpoB are required for the synthesis of cell walls in Escherichia coli. Attached to the bacterial outer membrane, these new cell wall components regulate penicillin-binding proteins located at the inner membrane.

Engineering Cardiac Muscle Tissue

The origin of the term tissue engineering is not clear, but a 1985 proposal of Y.C. Fung to the National Science Foundation of the United States for a Center for the Engineering of Living Tissues and 2 conferences organized by the National Science Foundation in 1987 and 1988 are generally accepted as the origin of this lively and rapidly growing research field (The Emergence of Tissue Engineeri...

New ways of looking at old issues: inequality and growth

Ž . The paper uses new cross-country data on income and asset land distribution to show Ž . that i there is a strong negative relationship between initial inequality in the asset Ž . distribution and long-term growth; ii inequality reduces income growth for the poor, but Ž . not for the rich; and iii available longitudinal data provide little support for the Kuznets hypothesis. Policies that in...