Beating cardiac tissue has been created in the lab from human embryonic stem cells by researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology’s biomedical engineering faculty and the Rappaport Medical Faculty. In addition, researchers Dr. Shulamit Levenberg and Prof. Lior Gepstein also managed to bring about the creation of tiny blood vessels within the tissue, which makes possible their tissue’s implantation in a human heart.
[..] The technique is aimed eventually at helping patients who have cardiac insufficiency due to heart attacks.
Levenberg, a 38-year-old modern Orthodox mother of five including a baby, has devoted her professional career to cutting-edge tissue engineering research that she hopes will eventually lead to the creation of lab-manufactured tissues and organs for transplants and the curing of degenerative diseases. She earned her bachelor’s degree in biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, after which she went for a five years of post-doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she built biological scaffolds to coax stem cells into developing into specific cell types.
