Birth of new cardiac cells
Recent research has shown that there are new cells that develop in the heart, but how these cardiac cells are born and how frequently they are generated remains unclear. In a study from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), researchers used a novel method to identify the new heart cells and describe their origins. The research was published today in Nature. “The question about how often cardiac cells are born has been extremely difficult to answer because there was a need for new techniques to help us understand this process,” said Harvard Medical School Professor of Medicine Richard T. Lee, the senior author of the paper and a researcher in the Cardiovascular Division at BWH. “We are especially excited about our findings because of the novel way in which we were able to show new heart cells, using multi-isotope imaging mass spectrometry (MIMS),” Lee continued. “Our collaborator, [HMS Associate Professor of Medicine] Claude Lechene, had...