Electronic pacemakers help patients' hearts keep proper time and beat with the right rhythm to keep them alive, a job usually done by specialized pacemaker cells in the heart. Patients who need pacemakers often don't have enough of these cells, and as a result, their hearts can beat too fast or too slow, endangering their lives.
There may soon be a less invasive biological solution for folks suffering from irregular heartbeats, though -- researchers at the
Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute are reporting that they've developed a
technique to turn normal heart tissue cells into time-keeping pacemaker cells with the insertion of just a single gene.
Read on...
