“For heart transplants there is a shortage of available organs, while artificial heart pumps are expensive and come with a high rate of complications.

Now scientists believe they have made a breakthrough by creating implantable patches composed of beating heart muscle that can help the organ contract.

Prof Ingo Kutschka, the co-author of the work from University Medical Center Göttingen in Germany, said: ‘We now have, for the first time, a laboratory grown biological transplant available, which has the potential to stabilise and strengthen the heart muscle.’

The patches are made from cells taken from blood and ‘reprogrammed’ to act as stem cells, which can develop into any cell type in the body.

In the case of the patches, these cells are turned into heart muscle and connective tissue cells. They are embedded in a collagen gel and grown in a custom-made mould before the resulting hexagonal patches are attached, in arrays, to a membrane. For humans this membrane is about 5cm by 10cm in size.

Prof Wolfram-Hubertus Zimmermann, another author of the work from University Medical Center Göttingen, said the muscle in the patches had the characteristics of a heart that was just four to eight years old.”

From The Guardian.