ISRAELI RESEARCHERS MAKE DRAMATIC BREAKTHROUGH IN TREATING HEART DISEASE
By Dan Even
Haaretz.com
August 26, 2009
Israeli researchers have made a dramatic breakthrough in treating heart disease, growing heart muscle in rats' abdomens and using it to patch the hearts of rats that suffered heart attacks.
The experiment, whose results were published this week in an American journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to demonstrate the possibility of rejuvenating the heart after a heart attack. While many researchers have tried to develop heart patches, until now, none of the tissue patches have survived implantation into the heart.
The Israeli researchers were led by Dr. Tal Dvir, who developed the new method for his Ph.D. thesis at Ben-Gurion University and is now at MIT.
The researchers planted cardiac cells taken from newborn rats on a laboratory "scaffold" and seeded them with growth agents. Once the cells had grown sufficiently, the entire scaffold was implanted in the rat's abdomen, where the tissue continued to grow and developed a network of blood vessels. A week later, the new tissue was removed from the abdomen and transplanted into the damaged heart.
After 28 days, the blood vessels in the patch had linked up with the damaged heart's own blood vessels. This, Dvir said, prevented it from dying of lack of oxygen, as previous bioengineered patches have.
Moreover, the patch appeared to actually improve the damaged heart. A heart attack leaves a scar that usually tightens over time and exerts pressure on the heart wall, which often leads to another heart attack. The tissue patch prevented this deterioration.
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