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Main entrance to the Weizmann
Institute (Photo credit: Weizmann.ac.il)
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Prolonging the life of heart attack
victims may become a reality for millions as scientists have successfully
tested on mice a way to activate the regrowth of heart muscle. Human trials are
expected to follow.
The combined effort of Australian
and Israeli researchers at the Sydney Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute
and the Weizmann Institute of Science has led to a regeneration of muscle cell
numbers in the heart by as much as 45 percent.
Their research was published in the
journal Nature Cell Biology.
The report continues:
The growth of cells was accelerated
by “turbo-charging” a specific
hormone called neuregulin, according to Sydney-based Professor Richard Harvey
from the University of New South Wales.
"The
dream is that one day we will be able to regenerate heart tissue, much like a
salamander can regrow a limb if it is bitten off by a predator," Harvey said in a statement from
the researchers.
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Image from wikipedia.org
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The problem is the heart’s
regenerative capacity for cells stops functioning in our infancy, so
regenerating whole sections was always out of the question. But according to
Harvey, “some previous work has shown
that it is possible to regrow heart muscle, but at clinically or
therapeutically trivial levels,” Harvey said, according to Australia’s
The Age daily.
The heart is markedly different in
this respect from human blood, hair and skin cells, which are renewed
throughout life. But as far as heart muscle goes, we can’t match some animals.
“So
there’s always been an intense interest in the mechanism salamanders and fish
use which makes them capable of heart regeneration, and one thing they do is
send their cardiomyocytes, or muscle cells, into a dormant state, which they
then come out of to go into a proliferative state, which means they start
dividing rapidly and replacing lost cardiomyocytes,” Harvey said, according to The Guardian.
The professor believes the reason
the human heart can’t do the same is possibly because of a trade-off, wherein “human cardiomyocytes are in a deeper state
of quiescence, [which] has made it very difficult to stimulate them to divide.”
The institutes showed with the
example of mice that harnessing the power of neuregulin provides the ability to
influence the hart’s signaling system, telling it to grow more cells. We can
build on that knowledge to later tell the heart exactly what to repair by
prescribing the person a specific drug.
Mice with induced heart attacks were
shown to recover their heart muscle tissue, all through triggering neureuglin.
"Heart
attacks are very common," Harvey says. "And a serious heart attack is an
injury that has lifetime consequences. The heart moves to heart failure,
enlarges, becomes floppy and can't pump any more. Then the only thing you can
do is a transplant, and heart donors are in short supply."
That is why the professor believes
that the neuregulin approach is a “significant
finding” that will have scientists in labs everywhere rushing to use it
and improve upon it.
A few hurdles need to be overcome
before humans can fully regenerate their hearts. The process first needs to be
proven to work on humans.
“We will
now examine what else we can use, other than genes, to activate that pathway,
and it could be that there are already drugs out there, used for other
conditions and regarded as safe, that can trigger this response in humans,” Harvey told The Guardian.
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