The July 2010 issue of ScienceDaily was concerned with the presentation of Professor Michael Schneider that took place at the UK National Stem Cell Network yearly science conference. The presentation made dealt with the description of a novel approach to treat heart attack and cardiomyopathy by making use of stem cells.
The British Heart Foundation Professor, Imperial College in London, Professor Schneider stated that the recent clinical trials that have been made using stem cells in order to treat heart damage have obtained success regarding the issue of safety. However, unfortunately the bone marrow stem cells that were used had the tendency to give only a little improvement in how well the heart is pumping.
He further said that they actually wanted to use stem cells from the patients themselves, as they knew that those cells could give rise to beating heart cells. These stem cells cannot be found in the bone marrow. The good news is the fact that they are now able to find ways to identify as well as purify these cells.
Nearly thousands of patients have been treated in around 20 trials across the world. The majority of these trials have been made by making use of the bone marrow stem cells or derivatives of the bone marrow cells so as to treat the damage that have been caused by heart attack. There exists also an important body of work that is concerned with searching for ways to produce beating heart cells for the stem cells. Approaches that have been proven best in relation to the creation of beating heart cells are using embryonic stem cells, heart-derived stem cells and induced pluripotent cells.
Professor Schneider further stated that by making use of heart-derived stem cells in the treatment of heart attacks and cardiomyopathy has a number of benefits compared to induced pluripotent cells and embryonic cells as they are regarded as deemed to be safer. It should also be taken into consideration that of these three types of cells, it is solely the heart-derived cells which are currently in human clinical trials for this type of treatment.
He moreover acknowledged that the greatest challenge is to make a perfect product for transplant. This would either be a combination of heart muscle- and blood vessel-forming cells or a pure population of some kind of precursor which could give rise to both blood and muscle vessels cells.
The team of Professor Schneider has found out a method of identifying heart stem cells in order to purify them for transplant. Initially the team developed the method in mice and even though the identifying markers are rather dissimilar in human cells, the team was successful in mapping their knowledge from the mice onto human beings.
The British Heart Foundation, the European Union (through the EU FP7 CardioCell consortium), the European Research Council, the Medical Research Council and the Leducq Foundation funded this research.
Professor Schneider declared that they have developed a way to identify cells which have three significant characteristics: they are certainly stem cells, they have the correct molecular machinery that is turned on so as to become a heart muscle or blood vessel, and they do not have, so far, any of the complete characteristics of blood vessel or heart muscle cells, like the production of cardiac myosin – a significant protein in heart muscle cells.
The next step in the research comprises of developing this technique into a method to extract, purify and multiply heart cells in the clinic to be used in repairing heart damage that arises from cardiomyopathy or heart attack. The laboratory of Professor Schneider makes use of highly advanced robotics, programmed microscopy as well as other sophisticated throughput methods for screening thousands of experimental conditions with the purpose of devising the best methods for growing the cells and instructing them to go down the route to become a heart muscle.
Source: Science Daily
Mon, Jul 19, 2010
Stem cells