In a new research, the scientists from University of Minnesota have created a beating heart in the laboratory.

“The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells,” said Doris Taylor, Ph.D., director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair, Medtronic Bakken professor of medicine and physiology, and principal investigator of the research.

The researchers have used a technique called decellularization, a process of removing all of the cells from an organ – in this case an animal cadaver heart – leaving only the extracellular matrix, the framework between the cells, intact.

They removed all of the cells from both rat and pig hearts, researchers injected them with a mixture of progenitor cells that came from neonatal or newborn rat hearts and placed the structure in a sterile setting in the lab to grow.

In less than four days contractions were observed and eight days later, the hearts were beating.

Researchers said that the decellularization process could be very important because it can be used to build new human hearts.

“We used immature heart cells in this version, as a proof of concept. We pretty much figured heart cells in a heart matrix had to work,” Taylor said. “Going forward, our goal is to use a patient’s stem cells to build a new heart.”