Courtesy Cell Press and World Science staff
Researchers seem to have identified a new way to fix a broken heart, a report says.
The scientists have devised a method to coax heart muscle cells into reentering the cell cycle, allowing the mature adult cells to divide and regenerate healthy heart tissue after a heart attack, according to mouse and rat studies described in the July 24 issue of the journal Cell.
The key ingredient is a growth factor known as neuregulin 1. The researchers suggest that the factor might one day be used to treat failing human hearts.
“To my knowledge, this is the first regenerative therapy that may be applicable in a systemic way,” said Bernhard Kühn of Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School. For instance, he added, people might one day go to the clinic for daily infusions of the substance over a period of weeks.
“In principle, there is nothing to preclude this going into the clinic. Based on the all the information we have, this is a promising candidate.” He emphasized, however, that further studies would be required to demonstrate safety before such treatment could be tested in human patients.
The heart had long been considered an organ largely incapable of repairing itself. Heart muscle cells, also known as cardiomyocytes, do proliferate during prenatal development. Soon after birth, however, the cells become binucleate, meaning that they have two nuclei, and withdraw from the cell cycle, giving rise to the notion that adult cardiomyocytes are incapable of further proliferation.
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