In the first trial of its kind in the world, 60 patients who have recently suffered a major heart attack will be injected with selected stem cells from their own bone marrow during routine coronary bypass surgery.
The Bristol trial will test whether the stem cells will repair heart muscle cells damaged by the heart attack, by preventing late scar formation and hence impaired heart contraction.
Dr Raimondo Ascione from the University of Bristol and colleagues at the Bristol Heart Institute (BHI), based in the Bristol Royal Infirmary, have been awarded a grant of £210,000 from the British Heart Foundation (BHF) to conduct the clinical trial.
Professor Jeremy Pearson, Associate Medical Director of the BHF, said:” We hope that this exciting Bristol project will provide information taking us a step nearer to the day when stem cells can be used routinely to help repair damaged hearts.”
In a heart attack, part of the heart muscle loses its blood supply (usually due to furring up of the arteries with fatty material) and cells in that part of the heart die, leaving a scar. This reduces the ability of the heart to pump blood around the body.
While the blood supply to the heart can be improved with coronary bypass surgery or angioplasty, thereby reducing the risk of further heart attacks, these techniques do not restore the viability and function of the area already damaged.
In 3-6 months after surgery, 20 per cent of patients develop a thinning of the walls of the heart, which in its most extreme form, can lead to congestive heart failure.
Dr Raimondo Ascione, Consultant Cardiac Surgeon, said: “I am very grateful to the British Heart Foundation for funding this important trial; the first of its kind worldwide. We have elected to use a very promising stem cell type selected from the patient’s own bone marrow. This approach ensures no risk of rejection or infection. It also gets around the ethical issues that would result from use of stem cells from embryonic or foetal tissue.
“Current treatments aim to keep the patient alive with a heart that is working less efficiently than before the heart attack. Cardiac stem cell therapy aims to repair the damaged heart as it has the potential to replace the damaged tissue.”
In this trial (known as TransACT), all patients will have bone marrow harvested before their heart operation. Then either stem cells from their own bone marrow or a placebo will be injected into the patients’ damaged hearts during routine coronary bypass surgery. The feasibility and safety of this technique has already been demonstrated.
As a result of the chosen double blind placebo-controlled design, neither the patients nor the surgeon knows whether the patient is going to be injected with stem cells or placebo. This ensures that results are not biased in any way, and is the most powerful way to prove whether or not the new treatment is effective.
Source: University of Bristol
Related stories:
Want a reason to love your lower belly fat? It's rich in stem cells
Fat removed from the lower abdomen and inner thigh through liposuction was found to be an excellent source of stem cells, with higher stem cell concentrations than other areas of the body, reports a Brazilian-based study in August's
Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). This is the first study of its kind to examine whether fat tissues from different areas of the body vary in stem cell concentration.
Researchers grow human blood vessels in mice from adult progenitor cells
For the first time, researchers have successfully grown functional human blood vessels in mice using cells from adult human donors — an important step in developing clinical strategies to grow tissue, researchers report in
Circulation Research: Journal of the American Heart Association.
Probing Question: Fishhooks of addiction
When the American writer Theodore Roethke taught at Penn State from 1936 to 1943, he was known for three things: being a good poet, coaching the men’s tennis team, and falling down drunk, perhaps the latter more than the former. Roethke, a brilliant and tortured man, knew well the seduction of drink and the agony of addiction. In his poem “Journey Into the Interior,” Roethke writes, “In the long journey out of the self, / There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places / Where the shale slides dangerously / And the back wheels hang almost over the edge / At the sudden veering, the moment of turning.”
Cancer drug shows promise against graft vs. host disease
A new University of Michigan study in mice suggests that a drug recently approved to fight cancer tumors is also able to reduce the effects of graft-versus-host disease, a common and sometimes fatal complication for people who have had bone marrow transplants.
Researchers uncover benefits of aspirin for treating osteoporosis
Researchers at the University of Southern California, School of Dentistry have uncovered the health benefits of aspirin in the fight against osteoporosis. Forty-four million Americans, 68 percent of whom are women, suffer from the debilitating effects of osteoporosis according to the National Institute of Health. One out of every two women and one in four men over 50 will have an osteoporosis-related fracture in their lifetime.
New study ties ending moderate drinking to depression
Scientific evidence has long suggested that moderate drinking offers some protection against heart disease, certain types of stroke and some forms of cancer.
Gene directs stem cells to build the heart
Researchers have shown that they can put mouse embryonic stem cells to work building the heart, potentially moving medical science a significant step closer to a new generation of heart disease treatments that use human stem cells.
Sweat, luck and eureka: Recipes for scientific discovery
Every week thousands of academic articles heralding discoveries in medicine and science are vetted and validated before being published in no-nonsense journals with names such as "Acta Crystallographica," "Methods in Enzymology," or "Macromolecules".