PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

20-Aug-2014

Contact: Craig Boerner craig.boerner@vanderbilt.edu 615-322-4747 Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Endothelial cells residing in the coronary arteries can function as cardiac stem cells to produce new heart muscle tissue, Vanderbilt University investigators have discovered.

The findings, published recently in Cell Reports, offer insights into how the heart maintains itself and could lead to new strategies for repairing the heart when it fails after a heart attack.

The heart has long been considered to be an organ without regenerative potential, said Antonis Hatzopoulos, Ph.D., associate professor of Medicine and Cell and Developmental Biology.

"People thought that the same heart you had as a young child, you had as an old man or woman as well," he said.

Recent findings, however, have demonstrated that new heart muscle cells are generated at a low rate, suggesting the presence of cardiac stem cells. The source of these cells was unknown.

Hatzopoulos and colleagues postulated that the endothelial cells that line blood vessels might have the potential to generate new heart cells. They knew that endothelial cells give rise to other cell types, including blood cells, during development.

Now, using sophisticated technologies to "track" cells in a mouse model, they have demonstrated that endothelial cells in the coronary arteries generate new cardiac muscle cells in healthy hearts. They found two populations of cardiac stem cells in the coronary arteries a quiescent population in the media layer and a proliferative population in the adventitia (outer) layer.

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Vanderbilt researchers find that coronary arteries hold heart-regenerating cells