Surgeons will soon be able to literally mend a broken heart, using live tissue grown from a patient’s very own stem cells, cardiologists said this week

The whole procedure – harvesting cells from bone marrow, growing tissue, and surgically implanting the heart muscle or valve – could take as little as six weeks and could become routine within three-to-five years, they reported.

One reason heart attacks are so debilitating, even when they are not fatal, is because the human heart – a massive muscle surrounding four valves controlling the body’s blood flow – does not regenerate. Damaged tissue stays damaged.