New heart repair therapy

[El_Machinae]

This is a pretty big deal, actually. Heart attack is a major cause of death in the Western world. As well, heart attack survivors suffer a decreased quality of life after an event (and an increase likelihood of death). Heart disease is one of the 'big two' major causes of death (that and cancer).

The numbers aren't small either. In the USA, there are 1,200,000 heart attacks every year (just over a third are fatal) and so there are many hundreds of thousands of people generated every year that can benefit from heart repair therapies.

The real goal is a therapy that can be injected and will allow healing over time. Much easier than surgery! The therapy was discovered by Geron, who have a bunch of other interesting notches in their belts.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20450144/

Human stem cells heal the hearts of rats
‘Survival cocktail’ helped repaired hearts thrive in experiment

A nutritious cocktail helped human embryonic stem cells thrive and repair the damaged hearts of rats, U.S. researchers reported on Sunday.
...
When they caused heart attacks in the rats and then injected the new heart muscle cells, every graft survived and integrated into the hearts of the rats.

They beat in rhythm and improved the heart function of the rats, they reported.

“This is one of the most successful attempts so far using cells to repair solid tissues — every one of the treated hearts had a well-developed tissue graft,” Murry said.

June was a very excellent month in stem cells, too.
http://forum.physorg.com/index.php?showtopic=15901&st=0&#entry230603

 

[Narz]

Or the rats could just eat less.

Thousands of dollars on an experimental procedure vs. caloric restriction? No contest. This "cocktail" is going to make someone very rich!

 

[Masquerouge]

While I tend to agree that a non-negligible amount of heart attacks are due to poor dietary habits, I still think it's pretty darn cool to have a new therapy available, and I'm eagerly awaiting the "But stem cells is murder" crowd.

 

[El_Machinae]

That's why I included the physorg link: those objections are almost a year out of date and completely obsolete.

 

[Masquerouge]

That's why I included the physorg link: those objections are almost a year out of date and completely obsolete.

Unfortunately, fighting irrational people with rational reasons doesn't work too well.

 

[Brighteye]

It's another step along the road, but this has been done before, as the quotation acknowledges.
The important one is being able to make pluripotent stem cells from differentiated tissue.

 

[El_Machinae]

I think that the goal is to save lives. Creating a therapy which is applicable to hundreds of thousands of people a year is pretty useful and good.