Posted on Fri, Oct. 16, 2009
WASHINGTON - Scientists have grown a piece of heart muscle - and then watched it beat - by using stem cells from a mouse embryo, a big step toward one day repairing damage from heart attacks.
Think of Kenneth Chien as a heart mechanic. "We're making a heart part and [eventually] we're going to put the part in," is how he describes the work by his team of Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital researchers.
Much work remains before trying that dramatic an experiment in people. But regenerating damaged heart muscle is a holy grail in cardiac care.
Doctors today have lots of treatments to prevent a heart attack. But once one strikes, there's no way to restore the heart muscle it kills. Gradually the weakened heart quits pumping properly, leading to deadly heart failure.
Hence the focus on embryonic stem cells, master cells that can give rise to any tissue in the body. Until now, scientists have not known how to coax those cells into producing pure cardiac muscle.
Instead, researchers have tried injecting heart-attack survivors with mixes of different kinds of stem cells, next-generation types like those found in bone marrow. The idea: Perhaps once those cells were inside a damaged heart, ones capable of growing cardiac muscle would receive a "get to work" signal and take root. There has been little success so far.
The new research, published in today's edition of the journal Science, promises a more targeted approach.
"It's not the home run," cautioned Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which is spending millions on research nationwide into cardiac regeneration. "But it's a major advance that's helping to move the field forward in a very significant way."
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