Tomorrow, we could repair the heart muscle thanks to this new method. Eventually, this discovery could lead to treatments capable of helping the heart to heal following an injury.
This is a big step forward for regenerative medicine, which involves repairing an injury or a diseased organ by replacing the damaged parts with healthy cell tissue.
For the first time, researchers from the Van Andel Institute and Spectrum Health in Michigan have developed a technique to determine which heart cells can replicate and which cannot. This could lead to the development of treatments allowing the heart muscle to regenerate its healthy muscle tissue. Their work has just been published in the journal Traffic Research.
“This new technique solves a long-standing problem that for years has hampered our ability to develop regenerative treatments for the heart,” says Stefan Jovinge, director of the DeVos Cardiovascular Research Program at the Van Andel Institute and Spectrum Health, and lead author of this new work. “This is a big step forward that we want to translate into providing better patient care.”
New therapeutic perspectives for patients with damaged hearts
Based on cell therapy and the use of stem cells, regenerative cardiac medicine has long remained in the realm of the impossible for researchers. In question: the inability of the latter to exploit the regenerative potential of the heart to repair the damage linked to heart attacks and heart failure. Unlike skin or bones, which can self-regenerate by creating new healthy cells, heart muscle cells lose their ability to replicate very early on. Doctors therefore have no other choice to repair the damage of a damaged heart than to go through surgery with, as a last resort, a heart transplant.
This new method, developed through the combination of two technologies – that of molecular beacons and that of fluorescence-activated cell sorting – has succeeded in filling this gap. For the first time, researchers have succeeded in specifically isolating heart muscle cells capable of dividing.
Further research is needed, but this discovery paves the way for the development of new strategies for regenerating heart muscle cells in patients with lesions, after a myocardial infarction for example.
“Now that we can precisely identify these cells, we can begin to determine the mechanisms that allow them to divide and find ways to restart this process, explains Professor Jovinge. This work is a great example of how basic research can have a major impact on future clinical care.”
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