A new study has shown that heart muscle cells can be grown from stem cells and used to repair damaged hearts. (Image credit: Noctiluxx via Getty Images)
A woman suffering from heart failure has been saved thanks to a new 'revolutionary' stem cell technology, scientists say.
The 46-year-old woman suffered a heart attack in 2016 and developed severe heart failure, in which the heart cannot pump blood effectively to meet the body's needs. The patient was awaiting a heart transplant when she underwent an experimental stem cell procedure as part of a clinical trial.
During the operation, tiny patches of heart muscle cells grown from stem cells in the lab were implanted in the woman's heart. The 10 patches, each containing about 400 million heart cells, kept the woman stable until she received a heart transplant three months later, according to a paper published Wednesday (Jan. 29) in the journal Nature.
“We now have for the first time a lab-grown biological transplant that has the potential to stabilise and strengthen the heart muscle,” study co-author Dr Ingo Kutschka, a cardiac surgeon at the University Medical Centre Göttingen in Germany, said at a press conference, Nature News reported.
Unlike many other types of cells, such as skin cells, heart muscle cells are not able to easily repair or regenerate after damage, such as a heart attack. This damage to the heart can lead to heart failure, which affects about 6.7 million adults ages 20 and older in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Heart failure was listed as a contributing or underlying cause of death in more than 450,000 cases in the United States in 2022, the CDC reported.
More than half of patients with severe heart failure die within a year unless they receive a heart transplant, but the number of available donor organs is limited, Nature News reports.
To supplement these limited heart transplants, scientists have been experimenting with transplanting heart muscle cells. In a new Nature paper, the researchers describe a method for generating heart tissue from stem cells known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Scientists create these stem cells by harvesting normal adult cells and then reprogramming them back into a “pluripotent” state, from which they can develop into almost any cell type in the body.
The scientists stimulated these iPSCs to grow into heart muscle and connective tissue cells in the lab; the researchers then mixed the resulting tissue with collagen to create small patches that could be implanted onto the surface of the heart.
“The graft is basically outside the heart,” Dr. Jianyi Zhang, an iPSC bioengineering expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who was not involved in the study, told Nature. “It’s a real breakthrough.”
The scientists first tested similar patches on rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) with heart failure; the patches used on the monkeys were grown using monkey stem cells. After six months, several monkeys had thicker heart walls and were able to pump 10 percent more blood per heartbeat than a group without treatment.
During the patch procedure, all the monkeys were given immunosuppressants to prevent their immune systems from rejecting the transplants. In addition, none of the monkeys developed tumors or irregular heartbeats, which have been problems in similar studies conducted previously.
The success of the monkey trial opened the door to testing in human volunteers, one of whom was a 46-year-old woman. After the heart transplant, the researchers examined her old heart and found that the implanted patches had grown into small blood vessels, indicating that they were receiving blood and oxygen from the body.
“It is now clear that we can add muscle mass to a diseased heart, and we can do it without fear
Sourse: www.livescience.com
