Science is finding ways to regenerate your heart

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It is hard to mend a broken heart, but in a few years doctors might be able to do essentially that. Scientists are closing in on ways to help patients grow new heart muscle after a heart attack, as well as new lung tissue to treat fibrosis, corneas to erase eye pain and other body parts to gain a new chance at life.

If the science works, it could represent a new approach to medicine: reversing rather than alleviating chronic illnesses. The idea “is really to restore function to the organ such that the quality of life of that person is normalized," says Peter Schultz, president and chief executive of Scripps Research, a nonprofit scientific institute in La Jolla, Calif., that is testing medicines to regenerate hearts, lungs and other organs. These treatments eventually might also be used to reverse the effects of aging, Schultz says.

If they prove effective in people with disease, he says, they could be tested in healthy people to see if they can, say, “turn a 70-year-old heart into a 40-year-old heart." The need for regenerated hearts alone is huge. Up to 3% of the world’s population suffers from heart failure, in which a heart whose muscle has been damaged by a heart attack or another disease gradually loses its ability to pump blood. The condition affects about 6.5 million people in the U.S.

and is the leading cause of hospitalization among Medicare patients. Certain salamanders and zebrafish can regenerate their hearts, along with limbs and other organs. Humans have only a limited capacity to regenerate, with skin and the liver as the main examples.

They die with most of the same heart-muscle cells they were born with. “We’re built for performance and not repair," says Dr. Chuck