source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/Skin-cells-to-help-repair-broken-heart-muscles/articleshow/13427684.cms
LONDON: Scientists claim to have developed a new technique to mend broken hearts by turning skin stem cells into heart muscle cells, a breakthrough they say offers new hope to thousands who struggle to live with heart failure.
The new research, which was carried out on rats, opens up the prospect of reprogramming cells taken from heart failure patients that would not be rejected by their bodies, said researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel. However, it would take up to a decade before trials can be conducted on humans, the scientists cautioned.
Previously skin cells taken from young and healthy people have been transformed into heart muscle cells. But, the new study, published in the European Heart Journal , was first in which stem cells taken from the skin of elderly and diseased patients, who are most likely to need such treatment, have been transformed into heart cells.
"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," Lior Gepstein, who led the study, was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.
In their study, skin cells from two male heart failure patients were reprogrammed in two ways - by delivering three genes to the cell nucleus and using a virus that delivered reprogramming information to the cell nucleus but which was capable of being removed later.
The skin cells were transformed into heart muscle cells as effectively as those from healthy and young volunteers.
The new research, which was carried out on rats, opens up the prospect of reprogramming cells taken from heart failure patients that would not be rejected by their bodies, said researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel. However, it would take up to a decade before trials can be conducted on humans, the scientists cautioned.
Previously skin cells taken from young and healthy people have been transformed into heart muscle cells. But, the new study, published in the European Heart Journal , was first in which stem cells taken from the skin of elderly and diseased patients, who are most likely to need such treatment, have been transformed into heart cells.
"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," Lior Gepstein, who led the study, was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.
In their study, skin cells from two male heart failure patients were reprogrammed in two ways - by delivering three genes to the cell nucleus and using a virus that delivered reprogramming information to the cell nucleus but which was capable of being removed later.
The skin cells were transformed into heart muscle cells as effectively as those from healthy and young volunteers.
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