Heart: Muscle Regeneration

If you were to step into the cardiac research lab at UC Davis Medical Center, you would find over 25,000 heart cells – each developing, growing and eventually shaping into individual formations called cardio-spheres. Take a closer look and you would notice that each of these clusters have another unusual quality – a heartbeat. These are patients' own stem cells being used to regenerate heart tissue damaged by heart attack or disease.

Before this promising breakthrough, drug therapy was the only option to treat the damaged heart muscle. Otherwise, patients would have to live with an impaired heart or wait to undergo a complicated heart transplant. Now with the help of world-renowned scientists and researchers, it is possible to correct the issue in less than six weeks. It is a scene straight out of science fiction, and yet it's happening here, at UC Davis Health System.

Learn more about this and other exciting breakthroughs in cardiology at UC Davis Health System.