New York, October 18: In a major step towards growing replacement for parts of damaged heart, Harvard researchers have created a strip of pulsing heart muscle from mouse embryonic stem cells.
The new study, which was published in the journal Science today, begins to confront what will be a major frontier for stem cell biology: translating recent basic science advances to meet the promise of regenerative medicine by finding ways to make such cells functional and potentially useful for therapies.
The new research led by Dr Kenneth R Chien, director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Cardiovascular Research, first isolated a progenitor cell that would only give rise to ventricular muscle cells – the working muscle that drives blood around the body, and the tissue that is damaged during a heart attack.
Then, collaborating with biomedical engineers, they seeded those cells on a thin film that had been engineered in such a way that it encouraged them to begin to form cardiac muscle.
“I think over the last five years or so, we’ve made great progress in being able to guide stem cells into whatever cell type we want, in this case it is heart,” Dr Deepak Srivastava, director of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease at the University of California, San Francisco, told The Boston Globe yesterday.
The new work “has begun to think about how to assemble these types of cardiac cells into a 3-D fashion, for future use within a heart. It’s a long way from that right now . . . but it’s a first baby step toward that goal,” Dr Srivastava, who was not involved in the research said.
For years, scientists have been able to turn embryonic stem cells into a variety of heart cells, producing dramatic videos of cells beating in a dish.
Chien, in collaboration with Kevin Kit Parker, a faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically, is working to find ways to do the same thing using human cells, and eventually to engineer a three-dimensional patch of muscle.
Ultimately, the work raises the possibility that a patient’s own skin cells could be used to generate cells to repair their heart, turning adult cells into embryonic-like cells capable of turning into any cell in the body.
“This represents, we think, an important step moving from stem cell biology in the heart to regenerative cardiovascular medicine,” said Chien, who anticipates early stage clinical trials of cell therapy could begin within five years.
“Basically, what we’ve got is proof of concept. There are still some challenges here,” he said.
-Agencies