Stem cell treatments may soon be used to repair damaged hearts following the success of a pioneering trial, revealed today.
US doctors have successfully shown that heart muscle can be repaired with cells taken from the patients themselves, according to a report in The Lancet.
The researchers in Los Angeles, UK, tested the treatment on 17 patients.
The novelty of the treatment is that it uses cells taken directly from the heart – rather than using them from bone marrow as in other treatments.
The findings were welcomed by the British Heart Foundation, which has launched a major drive to back so-called regenerative medicine.
Associate medical director Professor Jeremy Pearson said: “It’s the first time these scientists’ potentially exciting work has been carried out in humans, and the results are very encouraging.
“These cells have been proven to form heart muscle in a Petri dish but now they seem to be doing the same thing when injected back into the heart as part of an apparently safe procedure.
“It’s early days, and this research will certainly need following up, but it could be great news for heart attack patients who face the debilitating symptoms of heart failure.”
Researcher Professor Eduardo Marbán, of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, said: "This has never been accomplished before, despite a decade of cell therapy trials for patients with heart attacks. Now we have done it. The effects are substantial, and surprisingly larger in humans than they were in animal tests.
"This discovery challenges the conventional wisdom that, once established, scar is permanent and that, once lost, healthy heart muscle cannot be restored."
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