Stems repair the heart after a heart attack – Biotech

Up to now, no really effective treatment has been found to address muscle loss and heart contractility caused by infarction: many successful experiments conducted on small Laboratory animals, such as rats, were subsequently unsuccessful for humans. The researchers then attempted to recreate this state of heart failure in five macaques thus reducing their ability to pump blood by more than 40%

Later in their infarcted hearts were injected ] 750 million of cardiac muscle cells ( cardiomyocytes ) obtained from human embryonic stem cells. One month after transplantation, the cells formed significant amounts of new muscle allowing the heart to recover a third of the lost functionality. Two of the five treated monkeys continued to improve their conditions: monitored for 12 weeks, they recovered two-thirds of the lost heart function.

If these results were also confirmed by human clinical trials, then we could develop a new regenerative therapy for heart failure. At the present time, however, many doubts remain because of the occurrence of arrhythmias in some treated animals, probably because transplanted cells are transformed into "pacemaker cells" that give birth to the heart beat independently.