Heart-Attack Damage Heals After Stem Cell Treatment

Feb. 13, 2012 -- A new stem cell treatment resurrects dead, scarred heart muscle damaged by a recent heart attack.

The finding, just in time for Valentine's Day, is the clearest evidence yet that literally broken hearts can heal. All that's needed is a little help from one's own heart stem cells.

"We have been trying as doctors for centuries to find a treatment that actually reverses heart injury," Eduardo Marban, MD, PhD, tells WebMD. "That is what we seem to have been able to achieve in this small number of patients. If so, this could change the nature of medicine. We could go to the root of disease and cure it instead of just work around it."

Marban, director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles, led the study. He invented the "cardiosphere" culture technique used to create the stem cells and founded the company developing the treatment.

It's the first completed, controlled clinical trial showing that scarred heart tissue can be repaired. Earlier work in patients with heart failure, using different stem cells or bone-marrow stem cells, also showed that the heart can regenerate itself.

"These findings suggest that this therapeutic approach is feasible and has the potential to provide a treatment strategy for cardiac regeneration after [heart attack]," write University of Hong Kong researchers Chung-Wah Siu and Hung-Fat Tse. Their editorial accompanies the Marban report in the Feb. 14 advance online issue of The Lancet.

Heart Regenerates With Stem Cell Help

The stem cells don't do what people think they do, Marban says.

It's been thought that the stem cells multiply over and over again. In time, they were supposed to be turning themselves and their daughter cells into new, working heart muscle.

But the stem cells seem to be doing something much more amazing.

"For reasons we didn't initially know, they stimulate the heart to fix itself," Marban says. "The repair is from the heart itself and not from the cells we give them."

Exactly how the stem cells do this is a matter of "feverish research" in Marban's lab.

The phase I clinical trial enrolled 25 patients who had just had a heart attack. On average, each patient had lost a quarter of his heart muscle. MRI scans showed massive scars.

Eight patients got standard care. The other 17 received increasing infusions of what Marban calls stem cells. The cells were grown in the lab from tiny amounts of heart cells taken from the patients' own hearts via biopsy. Six to 12 weeks later, the cells were infused directly back into patients' hearts.

A year later, the mass of scar tissue in the treated patients' hearts got 42% smaller. And healthy heart muscle increased by 60%. No such regeneration was seen in the patients who got standard care.

Because all of the patients were doing relatively well, there was no dramatic difference in clinical outcome. However, treated patients had a bit better exercise endurance.

"This discovery challenges the conventional wisdom that, once established, cardiac scarring is permanent and that, once lost, healthy heart muscle cannot be restored," Marban and colleagues conclude.

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Scarred Hearts Healed After Heart Attack

Dr. Eduardo Marbán, in his laboratory at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute. (Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute)

By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times / for the Booster Shots blog

February 13, 2012, 5:45 p.m.

Researchers have used cardiac stem cells to regenerate heart muscle in patients who have suffered heart attacks, also known as myocardial infarction.

The small preliminary study, which was conducted by the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles, involved 25 patients who had suffered heart attacks in the previous one and a half to three months. 

Seventeen of the study subjects received infusions of stem cells cultured from a raisin-sized chunk of their own heart tissue, which had been removed via catheter. The eight others received standard care. 

During a heart attack, heart tissue is damaged, leaving a scar.  On average, scars in patients who had the stem cell infusions dropped in size from 24% to 12% of the heart, said Dr. Eduardo Marbán, director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute and lead researcher on the study, which was published online Monday in the journal The Lancet.  (The journal has provided an abstract of the study; subscription is required for the full text.)

In an email, Marbán said he believed that the stem cells repaired the damaged heart muscle "indirectly, by stimulating the heart's endogenous capacity to regrow [which normally lies dormant]." He said that the most surprising aspect of the research team's finding was that the heart was able to regrow healthy tissue. Conventional wisdom holds that cardiac scarring is permanent.

A follow-up study involving about 200 patients is planned for later this year, Marbán added.

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Study: Cardiac stem cells can reverse heart attack damage

They also help to reduce scar size

Infusion of cardiac stem cells into persons who suffered heart attack recently can help to regenerate their heart muscles, says a study published on February 14, in The Lancet.

Phase I of the study was conducted on 17 patients, who received stems cells, and eight, who received standard care (control group), at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles and Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. All of them had had heart attacks about a month before the study began in May 2009. The stem cells were created from the patients' heart tissues.

Visible improvements were seen in those who received infusion of stem cells, compared with the control group at the end of six months and a year. While no change in the scar size was seen in the control group, there was more than 12 per cent reduction in the size at the end of six months in the treatment group.

As scar size is directly related to scar mass, a reduction of 8.4 gram (28 per cent) and almost 13 gram (42 per cent) in scar mass was seen in the treatment group at the end of six months and 12 months.

Surprisingly, scar mass reduction was accompanied by an increase in viable myocardial mass. In fact, on an average, the increase in viable myocardial mass was “about 60 per cent more than scar reduction.” This is significant as it had led to a “partial restoration of lost left ventricular mass in patients with CDCs [cardiosphere-derived cells],” the authors of the study noted.

The study thus “challenges the conventional wisdom that once established, cardiac scarring is permanent, and that, once lost, healthy heart muscle cannot be restored.”

However, a change in scar size was accompanied by only 2 per cent increase in ejection factor (the amount of blood pumped by the heart), which is not considered significant.

While “the reasons for the discrepancy are unclear,” the study noted that “ejection factor at baseline was only moderately impaired, leaving little room for improvement.”

Of the six patients in the treatment group who had serious adverse events, only one was found to be related to the study.

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Cardiac stem cells can restore heart muscles, says study

30-01-2012 06:10 Professor Michael Schneider of Imperial College tells Alan Keys about how stem cell research is leading to treatments for heart disease. Michael describes how the availability of stem cells allows his team to determine the molecules involved in heart cell death and also how to protect those cells from death during a heart attack. Michael foresees a near future where stem cells are combined with other therapies to both repair hearts and enable hearts to self-repair. Alan Keys had his own heart repaired during an operation some years ago and currently chairs a British Heart Foundation patients committee. The British Heart Foundation part-fund the work of Michael's team at Imperial College. This interview was edited down from the original 35 minutes conversation. Read the transcript here: bit.ly Read more about Michael here: bit.ly and here: bit.ly

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Stem cells and heart repair - Video

13-01-2012 08:41 This is human heart muscle in a dish, beating spontaneously. It was made by Dr Lei Ye of the Stem Cell Institute from human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC). These were made by our iPSC facility from human skin cells into which 4 specific genes were temporarily introduced. The heart muscle cells were enabled to develop from the iPSC using a special medium and substrate. It is hoped to use cells like this for the treatment of heart disease by replacing heart muscle that has been destroyed.

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Human heart muscle in a dish, beating spontaneously. - Video

14-12-2011 20:22 Human tissue cells derived from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells recapitulate many of the characteristics and functionality expected of in vivo cell types. iCell® Cardiomyocytes are derived from human IPS cells and are currently being used in both drug discovery and basic research in Industrial and Academic settings. Dr. Eric Chiao of Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. (Roche) will lead this presentation and provide data showing the characterization and utility of iCell Cardiomyocytes, how they are being used in drug development, and how they are increasing our understanding of basic human cardiomyocyte cellular biology.

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Utilizing Stem Cell-derived Cardiomyocytes for Early Safety Screening - Webinar Presentation - Video

Posted: Monday, February 6, 2012 10:00 am | Updated: 11:50 am, Mon Feb 6, 2012.

Researchers at Rice University and Texas Children's Hospital have turned stem cells from amniotic fluid into cells that form blood vessels.

Their success offers hope that such stem cells may be used to grow tissue patches to repair infant hearts.

"We want to come up with technology to replace defective tissue with beating heart tissue made from stem cells sloughed off by the infant into the amniotic fluid," said Rice bioengineer Jeffrey Jacot, who led the study. "Our findings serve as proof of principle that stem cells from amniotic fluid have the potential to be used for such purposes."

The results were published online by the journal Tissue Engineering Part A. The research was conducted at Texas Children’s Hospital.

According to the American Heart Association, about 32,000 infants a year in the United States are born with congenital heart defects, 10,000 of which either result in death or require some sort of surgical intervention before they're a year old.

Jacot, an assistant professor of bioengineering based at Rice's BioScience Research Collaborative and of the Pediatric Cardiac Bioengineering Laboratory at the Congenital Heart Surgery Service at Texas Children’s Hospital, hopes to grow heart patches from the amniotic stem cells of a fetus diagnosed in the womb with a congenital heart defect. He said, because the cells would be a genetic match, there would be no risk of rejection.

"Between 60 and 80 percent of severe heart defects are caught by ultrasound," he said. "Ultimately, when a heart defect is diagnosed in utero, we will extract amniotic cells. By birth, we will have made tissue for the repair out of the infant's own cells. The timing is critical because the surgery needs to be done within weeks of the infant's birth."

Surgeons currently use such nonbiological materials as Dacron or Teflon, which do not contract or grow with the patient, or native pericardium, the membrane that surrounds the heart. Pericardium generally forms scar tissue and can only be used in the first operation. Both solutions require further operations and raise the risk of cardiac arrest, Jacot said.

Stem cells, the focus of both great hope and great controversy, are the cells in every organism that differentiate into specialized cells in the body. Stem cells drawn from human embryos are known to have great potential for treatment of defects and disease, but research into their use has been limited by political and other concerns, Jacot said.

That isn't the case with cells found in amniotic fluid, he said. Amniotic fluid is the liquid that protects and nourishes a fetus in the womb. Fluid is sometimes taken from pregnant women through amniocentesis, but cells for the Jacot lab's studies were drawn from women undergoing treatment for twin-twin transfusion syndrome.

"This is where two identical twins share a placenta and one is getting more blood than the other. It's not common," he said, noting that Texas Children's is one of the few hospitals that treat the syndrome. "Part of the general treatment is to remove fluid with the goal of saving both lives, and that fluid is usually discarded."

Jacot said other labs have tested amniotic fluid as a source of stem cells with promising results.

"Our work is based on five years of work from other labs in which they've discovered a very small population of amniotic stem cells – maybe one in every 10,000 – that naturally express markers characteristic of embryonic and mesenchymal stem cells."

Jacot and his team created a population of amniotic stem cells through a complex process that involved extracting cells via centrifugation and fluorescence-activated sorting. They sequestered cells with a surface receptor, c-kit, a marker associated with stem cells.

The cells were cultured in endothelial growth media to make them suitable for growing into a network of capillaries, Jacot said. When the cells were placed in a bio-scaffold, a framework used for tissue engineering, they did just that.

"Anything we make will need a blood supply," he said. "That's why the first cell type we looked for is one that can form blood vessels. We need to know we can get a capillary network throughout tissue that we can then connect to the infant's blood supply."

Jacot said the cells they tested grow very fast.

"We've done calculations to show that, with what we get from amniocentesis, we could more than grow an entire heart by birth," he said. "That would be really tough, but it gives us confidence that we will be able to quickly grow patches of tissue outside of the body that can then be sewn inside."

He said construction of a functional patch is some years away, but his lab is making progress. While embryonic cells have the most potential for such a project, amniotic cells already show signs of an ability to turn into heart muscle, he said.

Co-authors are graduate students Omar Benavides and Jennifer Petsche, both of Rice; and Kenneth Moise Jr. and Anthony Johnson, now professors at the Texas Center for Maternal and Fetal Treatment at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston with appointments at Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and CAREER programs, the Houston-Rice Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Med into Grad Program and the Virginia and L.E. Simmons Family Foundation.

(Submitted by Rice University; Posted by Emiy Moser, emoser@hcnonline.com)

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Rice University, Texas Children’s Hospital researchers makes strides towards fixing infants hearts

29-01-2012 23:26 Fourteen patients were randomized to see if adipose-derived adult stem cells would help limit the damage from an acute heart attack. Infarct size was decreased by 50%, the perfusion defect was 17% smaller, and the left ventriclular ejection fraction was increased about 6% better than the control group. Stem cell vocabulary was reviewed and highlighted that there are embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells and that sources of stem cell are from bone marrow, adipose tissue, blood, umbilical cord blood and from cloned embryonic cell lines. Stem cells can develop into 200 different cell types.

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Stem Cells Help Heart Attack Victims - Video

JUPITER, Fla., Jan. 31, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- BioRestorative Therapies, Inc. (OTCQB: BRTX) ("BRT") today announced that it has entered into a License Agreement with Regenerative Sciences, LLC ("RS") with respect to certain stem cell-related technology and clinical treatment procedures developed by RS. The treatment is an advanced stem cell injection procedure that may offer relief from lower back pain, buttock and leg pain, or numbness and tingling in the legs or feet as a result of bulging and herniated discs.

To date, over 40 procedures have been performed on patients. It is a minimally invasive out-patient procedure, and objective MRI data and patient outcomes for this novel injection procedure show positive results with limited patient downtime. BRT intends to utilize the existing treatment and outcome data, as well as further research, to prepare for clinical trials in the United States.

Pursuant to the agreement, BRT will obtain an exclusive license to utilize or sub-license a certain medical device for the administration of specific cells and/or cell products to the precise locations within the damaged disc and/or spine (and other parts of the body, if applicable) and an exclusive license to utilize or sublicense a certain method for culturing cells for use in repairing damaged areas. The agreement contemplates a closing of the license grant in March 2012, subject to the fulfillment of certain conditions. 

Mark Weinreb, Chairman and CEO of BRT, said, "This possible alternative to back surgery represents a large market for BRT once it begins offering the procedure to patients who might be facing spinal fusions or back surgery (which often times is unsuccessful). By delivering a particular cell population using a proprietary medical device that inserts a specialized needle into the disc and injects cells for repair and re-population, BRT hopes to revolutionize how degenerative disc disease will be treated." 

About BioRestorative Therapies, Inc.
BioRestorative Therapies, Inc.'s goal is to become a medical center of excellence using cell and tissue protocols, primarily involving a patient's own (autologous) adult stem cells (non-embryonic), allowing patients to undergo cellular-based treatments. In June 2011, the Company launched a technology that involves the use of a brown fat cell-based therapeutic/aesthetic program, known as the ThermoStem™ Program.  The ThermoStem™ Program will focus on treatments for obesity, weight loss, diabetes, hypertension, other metabolic disorders and cardiac deficiencies and will involve the study of stem cells, several genes, proteins and/or mechanisms that are related to these diseases and disorders.  As more and more cellular therapies become standard of care, the Company believes its strength will be its focus on the unity of medical and scientific explanations for clinical procedures and outcomes for future personal medical applications.  The Company also plans to offer and sell facial creams and products under the Stem Pearls™ brand.

This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and such forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. You are cautioned that such statements are subject to a multitude of risks and uncertainties that could cause future circumstances, events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors and other risks, including those set forth in the Company's Form 10, as amended, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You should consider these factors in evaluating the forward-looking statements included herein, and not place undue reliance on such statements. The forward-looking statements in this release are made as of the date hereof and the Company undertakes no obligation to update such statements.

CONTACT:  Mark Weinreb, CEO, Tel: (561) 904-6070, Fax: (561) 429-5684

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BioRestorative Therapies Signs License Agreement for Stem Cell Disc/Spine Procedure

06-10-2011 17:25 A doctor becomes patient and gives his testimony on stem cell treatment he received to overcome heart failure.

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Stem Cell Treatment for Heart Failure - Video

Of all the body’s organs, the human heart is probably the one most primed for performance and efficiency. Decade after decade, it continues to pump blood around our bodies. However, this performance optimisation comes at a high price: over the course of evolution, almost all of the body’s own regeneration mechanisms in the heart have become deactivated. As a result, a heart attack is a very serious event for patients; dead cardiac cells are irretrievably lost. The consequence of this is a permanent deterioration in the heart’s pumping power and in the patient’s quality of life.

In their attempt to develop a treatment for the repair of cardiac tissue, scientists are pursuing the aim of growing replacement tissue in the laboratory, which could then be used to produce replacement patches for the repair of damaged cardiac muscle. The reconstruction of a three-dimensional structure poses a challenge here. Experiments have already been carried out with many different materials that could provide a scaffold substance for the loading of cardiac muscle cells.

“Whether natural or artificial in origin, all of the tested fibres had serious disadvantages,” says Felix Engel, Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim. “They were either too brittle, were attacked by the immune system or did not enable the heart muscle cells to adhere correctly to the fibres.” However, the scientists have now found a possible solution in Kharagpur, India.

At the university there, coin-sized disks are being produced from the cocoon of the tasar silkworm (Antheraea mylitta). According to Chinmoy Patra, an Indian scientist who now works in Engel’s laboratory, the fibre produced by the tasar silkworm displays several advantages over the other substances tested. “The surface has protein structures that facilitate the adhesion of heart muscle cells. It’s also coarser than other silk fibres.” This is the reason why the muscle cells grow well on it and can form a three-dimensional tissue structure. “The communication between the cells was intact and they beat synchronously over a period of 20 days, just like real heart muscle,” says Engel.

Despite these promising results, clinical application of the fibre is not currently on the agenda. “Unlike in our study, which we carried out using rat cells, the problem of obtaining sufficient human cardiac cells as starting material has not yet been solved,” says Engel. It is thought that the patient’s own stem cells could be used as starting material to avoid triggering an immune reaction. However, exactly how the conversion of the stem cells into cardiac muscle cells works remains a mystery.

More information: Chinmoy Patra, Sarmistha Talukdar, Tatyana Novoyatleva, Siva R. Velagala, Christian Mühlfeld, Banani Kundu, Subhas C. Kundu, Felix B. Engel
Silk protein fibroin from Antheraea mylitta for cardiac tissue engineering, Biomaterials, Advance Online Publication Januar 10, 2012

Provided by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (news : web)

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Scientists use silk from the tasar silkworm as a scaffold for heart tissue

27-01-2012 21:30 TORONTO - Doctors have performed Ontario's first cardiac stem cell transplant using cells from the patient's own bone marrow.

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Cardiac Stem Cell Transplant - Video

08-11-2011 12:57 Human pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocytes (cardiac tissue) grown on an "air-liquid-interface" culture system to produce "microheart" OrganDots™. These OrganDots™, a core technology supporting VistaGen's drug rescue programs, are used to evaluate the positive ("efficacy") and negative ("toxicity") of drugs and drug candidates on the electrical functions and beating rates of the microhearts.

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VistaGen's Cardiac OrganDots(TM) Produced for Drug Rescue - Video

21-06-2010 19:24 This video goes into Severe Heart Disease and shows how adult stem cells can improve the clinical condition.. More information can be found at http://www.vescell.com . The world's first and still leading heart stem cell company.

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Adult Stem Cells Used To Rebuild Heart Tissue Video.mp4 - Video

24-12-2011 14:49 bboy force back in action AKA captain boogiedown lives!! the DOUBLE BLIND STUDY of adult stem cell research extracted from bone marrow has worked a miracle! Witness the miracle. see part 1

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bboy force the stem cell miracle man part 2 of 2 witness the magic - Video

18-11-2011 05:34 UCL Lunch Hour Lecture: Prometheus and I: building new body parts from stem cells Professor Martin Birchall (UCL Ear Institute) Prometheus created life from clay, and within many biologists and surgeons there is a primal desire to do the same from the materials at hand, in an effort to stave off death and disease. Organ transplantation has been one Promethean solution, but a lack of donor organs, ethical and other issues limits the stretch of this technology

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Prometheus and I: building new body parts from stem cells (15 Nov 2011) - Video

CIRM has funded a $5.5 million Disease Team to develop a follow on clinical trial that uses a patient's own heart stem cells to regenerate scarred tissue damaged by a heart attack. The team is led by Eduardo Marban, MD, PhD, Director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute. Marban presented the team's latest progress at the December 8th, 2011 CIRM Governing Board meeting

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Stem Cell Clinical Trial for Heart Failure: Eduardo Marban - CIRM Spotlight on Disease - Video

MP3 http://www.4shared.com Guests: Anthony F. Sanchez, Christian Wilde Regenerative Medicine: In the first half of Tuesday's show, researcher Christian Wilde talked about the emerging field of regenerative medicine, and how scientists are actually building replacement body parts with stem cells. He announced that Dr.

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Coast To Coast AM - 15.11.2011 - 4/4 - Regenerative Medicine/Dulce Base - Video

Coast to Coast AM Regenerative Medicine/ Dulce Base Date: 11-15-11 Host: George Noory Guests: Anthony F. Sanchez, Christian Wilde News segment guests: Nick Begich, Dr. Robert Manning [Quick Info] First Half: Researcher Christian Wilde talks about the emerging field of regenerative medicine; scientists are actually building replacement body parts with stem cells.

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C2CAM - 2011.11.15 - Dulce Base - Regenerative Medicine - Video

orlive.uwhealth.org Researcher, Dr. Timothy Kamp, discusses the depth and breadth of stem cell research at the UW. Dr

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Latest Update on Stem Cell Research at UW - Dr. Timothy Kamp - Video