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Dog Heart Stem Cells Fix Heart Attacks
By Elizabeth Tolchin, News Editor
Drug Discovery and Development
01 July 2005
Researchers recently conducted a study where stem cells in the hearts of dogs were activated by a combination of growth factors to repair tissue damaged by a heart attack [K. Urbanek et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A., vol. 102, pp. 8692ˆ8697 (2005)] .
"We have been able to iddentify and isolate a resident cell pool in the dog heart, which has all the characteristics of a stem cell because they are self-renewing, clonogenic and multipotent," says Piero Anversa, MD, professor of medicine and director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute, New York Medical College, Valhalla, N.Y.
After they identified and characterized these stem cells, the researchers induced damage producing a myocardial infarction. "Once we establish that there is severe depression of function, following occlusion of the coronary artery, we activated and mobilized the resident stem cells by injecting them with hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1)." Through the characterization it was seen that these cardiac stem cells possess HGF-cMet and IGF-1 and that HGF-cMet is involved in the mobilization of the cells and IGF-1 is involved in the survival and growth of the cells.
"By knowing that the cells have this system, we are able to use these two growth factors to activate the cells and make them move in situ from the area of the surviving myocardium to the area of the infarct and regenerate locally," says Anversa. "The loss of function was substituted by a recovery of function which correlated completely with the magnitude of myocardial regeneration we found."
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