When a person has a heart attack, the heart muscle is usually greatly damaged. It can take many weeks or months for the muscle to heal and when it does it often has scar tissue present.
Having scar tissue on the heart muscle reduces the effectiveness of the muscle, making it difficult to fill the heart’s cavities with blood between beats and disrupting the heart’s rhythm. Scar tissue impairs a person’s cardiovascular performance and may eventually lead to heart failure.
A group of scientists have just released details of a new stem cell therapy that may be able to rejuvenate the heart muscle, reversing or preventing long-term cardiac damage. This stem cell therapy has already been tested in a clinical trial and has demonstrated some promising results.
One company testing this new stem cell therapy is Mesoblast, an Australian company based in Melbourne. They are already in late-stage clinical trials and are using the therapy on hundreds of patients with chronic heart failure.
Mesoblast’s new stem cell treatment begins by extracting stem cells from a healthy donor’s hip bones. These stem cells are filtered and treated before transplanted into the patient, where they begin to regenerate the heart.
The initial results from the trial are very encouraging. The next stage will be a fully randomised trial with a placebo, which is set to begin in 2018.
Mesoblast has been working on this stem cell treatment for many years. They published results from early stage trials in 2015 in the journal Circulation Research. These early trials discovered that the treatment was safe.
A Belgium company named TiGenix is also attempting to deal with scar tissue that forms on a heart after a heart attack. Their stem cell therapy involves patients being injected with a mixture of stem cells shortly after they have had a heart attack. The stem cells begin to heal the heart and prevent scar tissue being formed, which avoids long term problems like heart failure. TiGenix have just finished phase II trials, but no results have been published as of yet.
If either of these companies can prove their stem cell treatment is effective, it could save millions of lives worldwide.
Source: Stem Cell Therapy for Heart Failure Gets a Gold-Standard Trial
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