A team of German, Swedish, and British scientists has developed a new stem cell therapy which can repair a damaged heart, following a heart attack.
Although a human heart has the ability to make new muscle and possibly repair itself, the rate of regeneration is so slow that it can’t fix the kind of damage caused by a heart attack. A heart attack also creates scar tissue in place of working muscle tissue, which is less elastic.
But, the team, including scientists at AstraZeneca in collaboration with the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Karolinska Institutet, and Procella Therapeutics, a Swedish biotech, created a new stem cell therapy using human ventricular progenitor (HVP) cells to help pig hearts to repair itself.
HVP cells are known to play a crucial role in formation of the heart during embryonic development.
In the study, published in Nature Cell Biology, the team used pig models with acute injury and chronic ischemic heart failure. They demonstrated that HVP cells helped regenerate a healthy cardiac tissue following a heart attack. The therapy also showed to improve cardiac function and reduce scar tissue.