Protein "patch" will restore the heart after a heart attack
Sergey Syrov, XXII CENTURY
In the USA, a "protein repair kit" has been developed that restores the heart muscle damaged during a heart attack. The method has shown effectiveness during experiments on animals (mice and pigs) and will be tested on humans as early as 2017.
Professor Pilar Ruiz-Lozano from Stanford University and her colleagues published a report on their work in the journal Nature (Wei et al., Epicardial FSTL1 reconstruction regenerates the adult mammalian heart - VM).
In myocardial infarction, cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells) die from damage caused by lack of oxygen. In adult mammals, cardiomyocytes cannot fully recover from the effects of a heart attack, scars form in the heart muscle.
Currently, there is no treatment method that could effectively reverse the processes caused by a heart attack – and in the United States alone, it affects 735,000 people annually. A heart attack inevitably leads to further complications, including arrhythmias – abnormal heart rhythm and heart failure.
Professor Ruiz-Lozano and her colleagues set out to develop a therapy that will restore the ability of cardiomyocytes to regenerate.
Earlier studies on danio-rerio fish, whose heart cells have the ability to regenerate, showed that the epicardium – the inner layer of the pericardium lining the walls of the heart muscle – plays an important role in the regeneration of cardiomyocytes.
"We would like to know what in the epicardium stimulates the myocardium, the heart muscles, so that they recover," says Professor Ruiz–Lozano (in a press release Delivering missing protein heals damaged hearts in animals, Stanford-led study finds - VM).
The team used mass spectrometry techniques to analyze more than 300 proteins produced by healthy mammalian epicardium cells in an attempt to identify the compound responsible for cardiomyocyte regeneration. It was found that this property is possessed by a follistatin-like protein (FSTL1) of epicardial tissue. After a heart attack, the amount of this protein in the epicardium decreases.
In order to use the protein in infarction therapy, a "patch" was created for application to the damaged heart muscle, consisting of cell-free collagen, which models the structure of epicardial tissue, and FSTL1.
When testing the method on the hearts of pigs and mice that had suffered a heart attack, the scientists found that both the regeneration of existing heart muscle cells and the growth of new ones took place within 2-4 weeks. This improved the overall function of the animals' hearts, as well as increased their survival – even when the "patch" was applied a week after the heart attack.
The big advantage of the method is that it is "cell-free" – it does not contain foreign cells, therefore the patient will not need immunosuppressants.
Professor Ruiz-Lozano believes that her work opens the way to a revolutionary method for the complete cure of patients with heart attacks. The researchers hope that clinical trials of the "protein patch" will begin in the next two years.
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23.09.2015