New Heart Muscle Cells Grow From Patients' Skin

Featured Article Academic Journal Main Category: Stem Cell Research Also Included In: Cardiovascular / Cardiology;Biology / Biochemistry Article Date: 23 May 2012 - 2:00 PDT

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However, the researchers caution there are still many hurdles to overcome before such a method is available for patients, and estimate it may take five to ten years before clinical trials can begin.

The lead researcher of the study is Lior Gepstein, Professor of Medicine (Cardiology) and Physiology at the Sohnis Research Laboratory for Cardiac Electrophysiology and Regenerative Medicine, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel.

Advances in stem cell biology and tissue engineering bring ever closer the prospect of repairing damage heart muscle with new cells, but considerable challenges remain, not least how to source a good supply of new, healthy human heart cells without the immune system rejecting them.

Gepstein and colleagues took skin cells from elderly heart failure patients and reprogrammed into human-induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs), a type of stem cell that has the potential to become almost any type of cell in the body. They then showed that the hiPSCs could differentiate to become heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) that were able to integrate into heart tissue in rats.

Creating heart muscle cells from hiPSCs derived from skin cells is not new, it has been done several times before, but in those cases, the skin cells came from healthy, young volunteers. As Gepstein told the press:

"What is new and exciting about our research is that we have shown that it's possible to take skin cells from an elderly patient with advanced heart failure and end up with his own beating cells in a laboratory dish that are healthy and young -- the equivalent to the stage of his heart cells when he was just born."

"In this study we have shown for the first time that it's possible to establish hiPSCs from heart failure patients - who represent the target patient population for future cell therapy strategies using these cells - and coax them to differentiate into heart muscle cells that can integrate with host cardiac tissue," he added.

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New Heart Muscle Cells Grow From Patients' Skin