Reprogramming Skin Cells Into Heart Muscle Cells

Physicians and scientists at the Texas Heart Institute (THI) at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital, working collaboratively with the University of Houston (UH), Texas A&M Health Science Center in Houston and Baylor College of Medicine, have shown a new way to convert human skin cells into beating heart cells, according to an article being published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). “One of the great needs in repairing the human heart is to find a practical and safe means of generating new heart muscle cells” Researchers believe this is to be an important new and unique step toward being able to repair damage from heart…