Date: August 1, 2010
Summary:
researchers at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine have demonstrated exactly how mesenchymal stem cells from bone marrow can repair the heart – a critical step in stem cell research that could in the near future help millions of patients with heart failure. The findings, published in the July 29 issue of Circulation Research, a journal of the American Heart Association, address an area that has been of enormous interest to cardiologists since the first suggestion that bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells regenerate heart muscle damaged by a myocardial infarction (heart attack). Joshua M. Hare, M.D., director of the Interdisciplinary Stem Cell Institute at the Miller School, led the discovery which settles several major controversies in the field and shows that the stem cells used can restore heart function back to normal very rapidly after heart attack.
Below is an excerpt of a news story published in the Miami Herald yesterday about the study:
A medical research team led by University of Miami doctors injected stem cells into the hearts of pigs that had been damaged by heart attacks. Within two months, the doctors said, the stem cells made the pigs' hearts good as new. ...The new study, published in the July 29 issue of Circulation Research, a journal of the American Heart Association, builds on another UM study published in December. In that study, immature ``mesenchymnal'' human stem cells extracted from bone marrow and infused into the hearts of human heart-attack victims made their hearts less prone to dangerous arrhythmias and better able to pump blood.
The new UM study found that the stem cells helped the heart in two ways. First, some of the stem cells -- injected into the heart via catheter into the groin and up the femoral artery -- actually turned into new, healthy heart cells themselves. They replaced heart tissue killed by the heart attack, and became part of the heart muscle that contracts and beats to circulate the blood. Another part of the injected stem cells didn't turn into new heart cells but instead induced stem cells already existing in the heart to greatly multiply, building more heart muscle.
