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The long-term goal of the group is the development of a method to generate human hearts for transplantations. Organs generated from a patient’s own cells would not only solve the problem of transplant availability but would also overcome the complication of incompatibility and tissue rejection by the host immune system. One of the most promising methods examined for the production of organs in vivo is blastocyst complementation (BC). Regrettably, BC is not suitable for the creation of hearts. We are developing a novel method, induced blastocyst complementation (iBC), to overcome this limitation. By applying iBC, we are generating chimeric mice, made up of “host” and “donor” cells. Our aim is to exclude in the developing embryo “host” cells from the heart and “donor” cells from the remaining body, in order to create “host” chimeras with allogeneic and ultimately xenogeneic “donor” hearts.

Developing chimeric mouse embryo made up of green fluorescent “host” cells and red fluorescent “donor” cells. The white square marks the heart tube, which is depleted of “host” cells.