A breakthrough development could save lives of millions of people in America suffering from heart disease and failure.

Every year, over half a million people lose their lives in the United States due to heart failure, and thousands of them waiting for a suitable transplant. However a new scientific paper has come up with a potential answer to this deficiency: growing new ones.

A team of researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Regenerative Medicine (CRM) decided to do so. Published in the journal Circulation Research this week, their work proved that the idea can possibly become a game changer. The researchers used skin cells reprogrammed into stem cells for to produce functional heart tissue.

The idea would not only eradicate the need for perfect match donors, but would significantly decrease the probability of immune-rejection. Taking into consideration that an estimated 22 people lose their lives every day awaiting an organ, the implications could be significant.

The team, headed by Dr. Harold C. Ott, assistant professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, is based on past studies on rats. For the generation of a new heart, the researchers require what is known as a scaffold for bringing it into a shape. The process of growing this part of the heart, composed of proteins, is long and hard.

To avoid the move, the researchers used 75 donated hearts from the New England Organ Bank. Each of the hearts was unsuitable for transplantation, and the deceased either had brain dead or have had suffered cardiac arrest.

With the help of these hearts, the team used a ‘detergent’ that strips it of leftover living cells. After the absence of the components, the researchers got a perfect scaffold for seeding the new cells.

The ultimate step was known as genetic manipulation, and it included reprogramming skin cells, with the help of RNA, into stem cells and putting them into the heart to replicate the real environment.

Dr. Jacques Guyette, one of the study’s lead researchers, said, “Generating functional cardiac tissue involves meeting several challenges”.