A new breakthrough in stem cell research has helped a 39-year old man, Ken Milles, recover his health by regenerating damaged heart tissue. The same treatment was given to a patient named Mike Jones and again, like the last patient before him, Mike is now recovering.

Their new lease in life was attributed to infusion of stem cells grown from his own heart and the medical team in Cedars-Sinai led by Robert Bolli.

This new development in medicine has overturned a once long held belief that when the patient has reached this stage of heart disease, there is nowhere to go but down. The stem cell therapies has helped another 16 patients with severe heart failure as a test batch. Each of them received a purified batch of cardiac stem cell and within a year, all of the patients have displayed an improved heart function.

The test was quantified through the "Left Ventricle Ejection Fraction" to measure how much blood the heart pumps with each beat. Patients with 40% LVEF is considered suffering a severe heart failure. For four months after receiving the new treatment, the patients have improved their LVEF from 30.3% to 38.5%. After a year, the improvement jumped to 42.5%. A control group of 7 out of the 14 test subjects which were given standard treatment and medicine showed no improvement at all.

The treatment not only fixed the heart tissue by making scar tissue in their heart retreat, it actually regenerated new heart tissue. This research has unveiled that the heart contains the means to fix itself by using stem cells from it. The only problem is that there are not enough stem cells to do so.

While there are good news in the field of stem cell research there are also some bad news. The pioneer company of stem cell research announced that they would be exiting stem cell research and concentrating on cancer research today. In doing so, the only government approved stem cell researcher in the United States will lay off a sizable portion of its staff.