Tubular bone stem cells help with myocardial infarction
The main difficulty in the treatment of myocardial infarction is its timeliness. The earlier the necessary interventions are taken, the lower the risk of delayed complications, such as the development of heart failure. This significantly reduces the effectiveness of currently being developed methods of treating heart attack using stem cells.
Researchers from Temple University, working under the guidance of Dr. Steven R. Houser, believe that this problem can be solved with the help of donor stem cells isolated from tubular bones. In experiments on mice, they demonstrated that these cells cope with the task better than heart stem cells.
At the first stage of the study, the authors isolated stem cells from the tibia of genetically modified mice, in whose cells a green fluorescent protein is synthesized, which allows tracking the fate of donor cells in the recipient's body. The isolated cells were cultured in the laboratory until the required amount was obtained, after which they were injected into the cardiac tissue of normal mice who had suffered a myocardial infarction. Cardiac stem cells were injected into several mice instead of tubular bone stem cells.
Monitoring of the condition of the animals for several weeks showed that bone stem cells provided the growth of new vessels in the damaged tissue, and after six weeks they differentiated and turned into mature cardiomyocytes. Despite the fact that the emerging cells were slightly smaller in size than their own heart cells, they fully performed their function and generally improved the efficiency of the heart and increased the survival rate of animals. Similar improvements were observed in mice that underwent injections of cardiac stem cells, but analysis of their heart muscle showed no signs of differentiation of donor cells.
In the near future, the researchers plan to repeat the experiment on a larger animal model. If the results obtained can be reproduced, it will be possible to talk about conducting a small-scale clinical trial. Cells for transplantation to humans are planned to be isolated from the tubular bones of donors using a technique used for bone marrow sampling, which is simpler and less traumatic than harvesting cardiac stem cells. The use of donor cells is fraught with the development of an immune rejection reaction, but they can be harvested in advance and injected immediately if necessary.
Article by J. M. Duran et al. Bone-Derived Stem Cells Repair the Heart After Myocardial Infarction Through Transdifferentiation and Paracrine Signaling Mechanisms is published in the journal Circulation Research.
Evgeniya Ryabtseva
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru based on the materials of ScienceDaily:
Youthful Stem Cells from Bone Can Heal the Heart.
06.09.2013