Houston/London, January 13
You sure can mend a broken heart and stop believing in the popular wisdom that says the opposite, a research says.
Indian origin researcher Dr Kishore Pasumarthi of Dalhousie Medical School in Canada, who first found a way to prompt heart muscle cells to divide in adult heart muscle tissue, is determined to prove the old wisdom wrong.
Cell division in the heart stops in early infancy, which is why heart muscle cells that die in heart attacks are replaced by scar tissue instead of new cells. This damage can lead to heart failure and life-threatening arrhythmias.
“We are working with cell-cycle proteins the ones that control cell division. By putting these proteins into damaged heart tissues, we are finding we can repair the infarct damage,” Pasumarthi says.
Pasumarthi believes his approach could heal heart attack damage,
prevent heart failure and potentially deadly arrhythmias.
Originally trained in veterinary medicine and biotechnology in India, Pasumarthi made the transition to biomedical research during his Ph.D training at the University of Manitoba.
He has established his own myocardial regeneration research programme at Dalhousie Medical School. He’s working with stem cells as well as cell-cycle proteins.
“I’m going a step beyond stem cell transplants,” says Pasumarthi. “As the stem cells start to differentiate into various cell types, I’m identifying and isolating the cardiac progenitor cells into a pure culture.”
He will then transplant the cardiac progenitor cells into damaged hearts to see if they develop into functional heart muscle cells. Another project aims to prevent heart attack damage by blocking cell-death
pathways in the heart.
In another major breakthrough scientists have revived a “dead” heart back to life, a feat that could one day allow them to custom-build a range
of organs including kidney, liver or pancreas for transplant.
The procedure involved stripping cells from a dead heart, leaving its protein “skeleton”, and then replacing them with young cells that grew back into a working heart, The Sunday Times reported.
The research, however, has been done only in animals and is unlikely to be applied to humans for years, the report added.
The research was carried out by scientists at the University of Mennesota and is highly experimental.
Prof Doris Taylor, director of the university’s centre for cardiovascular repair, said it could be a significant step towards creating custom-built hearts, bloods vessels and other organs for people with serious illness.
The organs so built would use stem cells taken from the patient so the body’s immune system would not reject them, she said.
“The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells,” Taylor said.
“It opens a door to the notion that you can make any organ - kidney, liver or pancreas. You name it and we hope we can make it.”
Taylor and her colleagues used a process called decellularisation, in which powerful chemicals strip the cells from a dead animal heart. The researchers then reseeded the remaining protein skeleton with progenitor cells taken from the hearts of newborn animals and let them grow.
Taylor said four days after seeding, the cells could be seen contracting, and after eight days the hearts started contracting.
“We took nature’s building blocks to build a new organ,” said Harald Ott, who worked with Taylor.
“When we saw the first contractions we were speechless.” The new technique was reported at the American Heart Association’s recent annual meeting in Orlando, Florida.
“This is a proof of concept,” Taylor said adding, “Going forward, our goal is to use a patient’s
stem cells to build a new heart.” — PTI
