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Israeli scientists open prospect of repairing damaged hearts
Wednesday May 23, 2012 06:25:00 PM,
IANS
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Tel Aviv: In a unique
feat, Israeli scientists reprogrammed skin cells from heart
failure patients to grow into healthy, new heart muscle cells
capable of integrating with existing heart tissue.
The research opens up the prospect of treating heart failure
patients with their own, human-induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs)
to repair their damaged hearts.
As the reprogrammed cells would be derived from the patients
themselves, this could avoid the problem of the patients' immune
systems rejecting the cells as "foreign," the European Heart
Journal reported.
However, the researchers warn that there are a number of obstacles
to overcome before it would be possible to use hiPSCs in humans in
this way and it could take at least five to 10 years before
clinical trials could start.
Recent studies have shown that it is possible to derive hiPSCs
from young and healthy people and that these are capable of
transforming into heart cells.
However, until now, it has not been shown that hiPSCs could be
obtained from elderly and diseased patients.
Lior Gepstein, professor of medicine (cardiology) and physiology
at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, who led the
research, said: "What is new and exciting . . . is that we have
shown that it's possible to take skin cells from an elderly
patient with advanced heart failure and end up with his own
beating cells in a laboratory dish that are healthy and young --
the equivalent to the stage of his heart cells when he was just
born."
Limor Zwi-Dantsis, doctoral student in the Sohnis Research lab,
Gepstein and colleagues took skin cells from male heart failure
patients (above 50 years) and reprogrammed them by delivering
three genes or "transcription factors," followed by a small
molecule called valproic acid, to the cell nucleus, according to a
university statement.
"One of the obstacles to using hiPSCs clinically in humans is the
potential for the cells to develop out of control and become
tumours," explained Gepstein.
The researchers also used an alternative strategy that involved a
virus that delivered reprogramming information to the cell nucleus
but which was capable of being removed afterwards so as to avoid
becoming cancerous.
The resulting hiPSCs were able to differentiate to become heart
muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) just as effectively as hiPSCs that
had been developed from healthy, young volunteers who acted as
controls for this study.
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