Medical breakthrough raises hopes for heart attack patients
In brief
- British Heart Foundation hails the development as a major advance
- Researchers hope a treatment for humans could be available in five to ten years
Heart attacks inflict major damage on the cardiac muscle which cannot be repaired, leaving a permanent scar that often leads to heart failure and death.
Scientists have spent years testing out different ways to mend the damage through heart cell transplants, with little success.
Now, researchers have developed a new technique that shows huge promise in regenerating the crucial cardiac muscle cells that are destroyed during a heart attack – largely healing debilitating scars.
Research findings welcomed“We are really very excited. For the first time we have repaired heart damage in a large animal,” said lead researcher Professor Mauro Giacca, of King’s College London.
The British Heart Foundation, which part funded the research, strongly welcomed the findings.
“A treatment that helps the heart repair itself after a heart attack is the holy grail for cardiologists,” said Ajay Shah, the foundation’s chairman of cardiology.
“This study convincingly demonstrates for the first time that this might actually be feasible and not just a pipe dream,” he added.
Next steps
Prof Giacca plans to refine the technique with further tests on pigs before conducting an indepth clinical trial in humans.
He is confident that it will be effective in people, whose hearts are very similar to those of pigs.
All being well, a treatment could be introduced to the health service in five to ten years – where it has the potential to save thousands of lives a year in the UK, he said.
Nearly 1 million people in the UK have heart failure, many of them as a result of heart attacks.
The research
In this breakthrough, the researchers identified a gene in humans that causes the body to produce cardiac muscle cells.
At the moment, the gene typically switches off a month into our lives, meaning we have to make do with those cells for the rest of our lives. This is why heart attack damage cannot be mended.
In this study, scientists managed to isolate functioning versions of the gene and inject them into pig hearts in a harmless virus, which spread them across the organ.
The process was highly successful, repairing “a large part of the damage” after a month by increasing muscle and decreasing scarring in the heart. This left it almost fully functioning, according to Prof Giacca.
Obstacles to success
The success, however, was short lived, as the injected genes continued to produce new cells well beyond the point at which they were needed. This meant most of the pigs died.
But Prof Giacca is confident the researchers can overcome that problem by creating a synthetic version of the gene which will switch off after a couple of weeks.
He will spend the next six months developing and testing a synthetic version of the gene in pigs with a view to conducting a full scale clinical trial after that.
Scarring is bad because it makes the heart pump less efficient and stops all parts of the organ from contracting in unison.
Heart failure is widespread
Myocardial infarction, more commonly known as a heart attack, is caused by the sudden blocking of one of the cardiac coronary arteries. It is the main cause of heart failure, a condition that now affects more than 23 million people across the world, including about 920,000 in the UK.
Many of them could potentially be helped by a new treatment involving the heart cell-creating gene identified by the researchers, the study claims.
The research is published in the journal Nature. It also involved the Fondazione Monasterio hospital and the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies university, both in Pisa, Italy.
References: https://inews.co.uk/news/health/medical-breakthrough-raises-hopes-for-heart-attack-patient/
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