A woman with heart failure was kept alive long enough to receive a heart transplant, in part thanks to newly developed stem-cell-derived heart tissue grafts.

Muscle patches generated from stem cells helped ease heart problems in monkeys and a human patient, in a potential advance towards improving treatments for the scourge of cardiac failure. Rhesus macaques’ heart functions improved using the technique,

Although the Nobel Prize for induced stem cells was handed out over a decade ago, the therapies have been slow to follow. In a new paper published in the journal Nature, however, a group of German researchers is now describing tests in primates of a method of repairing the heart using new muscle generated from stem cells.