Scientists Including Greek Konstantinos Malliaras Repair Heart Attack With Patient’s Own Stem Cells

Details of a small clinical trial published in The Lancet on Tuesday reveal how scientists, including Greek researcher Konstantinos Malliaras, helped patients with hearts damaged by heart attacks to re-grow healthy heart muscle and reduce scar tissue with an infusion of stem cells taken from the patients’ own hearts.

Leading international cardiologist and heart researcher Dr Eduardo Marbán, who is the director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles and a Mark S. Siegel Family Professor, is the senior author of the study. He told the press what they saw in the trial:

“… challenges the conventional wisdom that, once established, scarring is permanent and that, once lost, healthy heart muscle cannot be restored.”

In 2009, Marbán and his team had already shown it is possible, following a heart attack, to grow specialized stem cells from the patient’s own heart tissue (called cardiosphere-derived cells or CDCs), inject them back into the patient’s damaged heart, and as a result reduce scars, increase muscle and boost cardiac function.

The purpose of the clinical trial (called CADUCEUS, short for CArdiosphere-Derived aUtologous stem CElls to Reverse ventricUlar dySfunction) was to assess the safety of such a procedure to repair damage in the left ventricle after a heart attack.

For the trial, which took place at two centres, the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute and Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, the researchers enrolled 25 patients of average age 53, who had experienced heart attacks two to four weeks earlier.

Each patient underwent extensive imaging scans to locate and assess the severity of the scars caused by their heart attacks.

The patients assigned to receive stem cell therapy underwent a minimally invasive biopsy under local anesthetic. During this procedure, doctors inserted a catheter through a vein in the patient’s neck and removed small pieces of heart tissue, about half the size of a raisin.

Back in Marbán’s specialized lab at Cedars-Sinai, the researchers used the pieces of heart muscle to grow autologous CDCs.

(Source:http://www.medicalnewstoday.com)