For the first time in medical history scientists have been able to transform skin cells into healthy heart muscle tissue. The ground-breaking experiment was conducted by a team from Rambam Medical Center in Haifa. The research was led by Professor Lior Gepstein, who described the importance of his findings to the Voice of Russia.
Yulia Monakhova; For the first time in medical history scientists have been able to transform skin cells into healthy heart muscle tissue. The ground-breaking experiment was conducted by a team from Rambam Medical Center in Haifa. The research was led by Professor Lior Gepstein, who described the importance of his findings to the Voice of Russia. Scientists expect this research to be very promising and not just for the treatment of heart diseases. Potentially it could be used in curing diabetes and different central nervous system disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. The input material for this was the skin cells of a couple of elderly patients suffering from impaired cardiac function. The researchers managed to “grow” healthy heart cells from these samples and inject it into an animal’s heart. The experiment showed that the cells can survive and integrate into the existing heart tissue. The results give hope as – in theory – there shouldn’t be any rejection of the tissue of the “donor” himself. The two elderly patients, whose cells were sampled, had suffered from heart attacks. Scientists were able to grow from those samples in the laboratory healthy heart muscle tissue, which was then transplanted into mice. This technology, which is the basis of the study, was developed by Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka. He was able to show that one could re-program adult cells to cells which resemble the earlier cells in the embryo. These cells can become any cell-type in the body. He called the cells to be generated “induced pluripotent stem cells” or “iPS-cells”. In other words, Yamanaka proved that it is possible to transform a regular cell into the equivalent of human embryonic stem cells. The innovation prompted Professor Gepstein to start his own research into stem-cells and using them to cure heart diseases. Gepstein described the future of his treatment to the Voice of Russia: “In this study we tried to see whether you can take skin cells from elderly and very sick individuals that have had heart failure and use them to generate heart cells. We took skin cells from patients with heart-failure, re-programmed them to generate iPS-cells, and then we took these stem-cells and differentiated them to generate heart cells. The heart cells of the patients themselves were very sick; they had dysfunctional heart cells, because they were suffering from heart failure and previous heart attacks. The heart cells that we generated from their skin cells were healthy and young, similar to heart cells of these specific patients at the time, when they were born.” Gepstein noted that if their method is approved, it will take at least 5-10 years before clinical use of this technology. “One of the problems that involved the use of iPS-cells is the concern that they may become tumorigenic or form cancer, so we need to make sure that this will not happen and will be extremely safe. Another obstacle is to improve the ability of the cells not only to engraft and survive, but also to mature and contribute to the function of the heart.” The scientists also still need to scale up the procedure. Currently they can make a few million heart cells, but a typical heart attack which leads to heart failure can kill roughly a billion healthy cells. Source: The Voice of Russia
