Potential New Treatment Regrows Heart Tissue
Posted on: Friday, 24 July 2009, 10:15 CDT
Researchers made a potential new breakthrough in human cardiac care when they discovered that injecting a growth factor could spur regrowth of heart tissue and improve heart function in mice without using stem cells, AFP reported.
The authors of the study published in the journal Cell said heart muscle tissue normally does not regenerate after a heart attack in patients with heart weakness or in children with hereditary malformations.
The protein NRG1 was injected into the peritoneal cavity of live mice after a heart attack, once daily for 12 weeks, researchers said.
The journal said in a statement that the researchers found that "heart regeneration was increased and pumping function (ejection fraction, assessed on echocardiograms) improved as compared with untreated controls."
Bernhard Kuhn of Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School said it is the first regenerative therapy that may be applicable in a systemic way.
He believes that an eventual human treatment could feature daily infusions of NRG1 at a clinic over a period of weeks.
"In principle, there is nothing to preclude this going into the clinic. Based on all the information we have, this is a promising candidate," Kuhn said.
However, he stressed that further studies are required to demonstrate safety before such treatment could be tested in human patients.
"While many efforts have focused on stem-cell based strategies, our work suggests that stem cells aren't required and that stimulating differentiated cardiomyocytes to proliferate may be a viable alternative," Kuhn added.
The team plans to characterize the regenerative response in pigs, which have more in common with humans than rodents do, before testing the approach in human patients.
He concluded that such a treatment might serve as a useful alternative or complement to treatments designed to seed damaged hearts with regenerative stem cells.
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Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports
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