Tag: Felix Engel

  • Health

    Broken hearts may mend after all

    Although adult muscle cells become inflexible after differentiation, these cells temporarily loosen the structure to divide in fetal development. Mark T. Keating found that in some lower vertebrates, heart tissue regenerates without the scarring seen in mammals. This seems to occur by proliferation of existing cardiomyocytes, not stem cells. Felix Engel, an HMS research fellow…

    1–2 minutes
  • Campus & Community

    Researchers induce heart cells to proliferate

    In the best-documented effort to date, researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School have successfully induced adult heart-muscle cells to divide and multiply. Heart-muscle cells, or cardiomyocytes, were previously considered incapable of replicating in mammals after birth, which is why heart attack is such a problem: Once…

    2–3 minutes