Heart Disease - Top 10 Advances of the Millenium (well,
so far)
4) Replacing damaged heart muscle with new cells
In October 2000, Dr. Philippe Menasche from Paris, France, reported on his “transplantation” of primitive skeletal muscle cells into the damaged heart of a 72 year-old man. The primitive cells – called myoblasts – were grown in a tissue culture from biopsies taken from the patient’s own leg muscles. The cells were injected, during a coronary artery bypass procedure, into an area of the patient’s heart that had been damaged by a previous myocardial infarction. Five months later, the new cells were shown to be metabolically active, and displayed contraction (i.e., they functioned like muscle cells.)
While it is not at all clear at this point that this patient received any clinical benefit from the new muscle cells in this early clinical experiment, the fact that cardiac scar tissue can be replaced with functioning muscle cells opens up an extremely exciting avenue for further investigation. It is very likely that within the next few years, similar techniques – possibly using bone marrow stem cells, or genetically manipulated skeletal muscle cells that will fully replace the damaged heart muscle cells – will offer a realistic new option for many patients with heart failure. (See Cardiomyopathy and Heart Failure.)
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