WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – Two studies published yesterday show new ways to fix damaged hearts, one by turning  structural heart cells into beating cells and another by  restoring a primordial ability to regenerate lost tissue.

The two approaches need more work before they can be tried  in humans, but they represent big steps forward in the new  field of regenerative medicine.

And they show it may be possible to repair broken organs in  the patient’s body, instead of resorting to transplants or  artificial devices.

In one study, a team at the Gladstone Institute of  Cardiovascular Disease at the University of California, San  Francisco made beating heart cells from more ordinary cells  called fibroblasts.

Stem cell researchers know they can reprogram these  ordinary cells by adding three or four genes to take them back  to an embryonic-like state. Teams are working to fine-tune  these so-called induced pluripotent stem cells or iPS cells.

Taking this approach a step further, Dr. Masaki Ieda and  colleagues found the genes that, in a developing embryo, turn  an immature cell into a beating heart cell or cardiomyocyte.