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Heart Disease: Mending a Broken Heart
– Reported, August 3, 2012
(Ivanhoe Newswire) – For years, scientists have been looking for a good source of heart cells that can be used to study cardiac function in the lab, or perhaps even to replace diseased or damaged tissue in heart disease patients. To do this, many are looking to stem cells. Researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham), the Human BioMolecular Research Institute, and ChemRegen, Inc. have been searching for molecules that convert stem cells to heart cells for about fifteen yearsand now they’ve found one.
“Heart disease is the leading cause of death in this country. Because we can’t replace lost cardiac muscle, the condition irreversibly leads to a decline in heart function and ultimately death. The only way to effectively replace lost heart muscle cellscalled cardiomyocytesis to transplant the entire heart,” Mark Mercola, Ph.D., director of Sanford-Burnham’s Muscle Development and Regeneration Program and senior author of the study told Ivanhoe.
“After you have a heart attack, not only do muscle cells die, but the heart tries to heal itself by scarring over, and we have known for a long time that the scar is hostile for making new muscle cells. What we think this compound does is limit the scar in order to create the muscle,” Dr. Mercola explained. “We have been looking for sometime for a way to stimulate stem cells to make heart muscle cells, ideally using a small molecule; we would be able to regenerate the heart by giving a drug, thats the long term goal. We discovered a molecule that has this ability, and we spent a lot of time figuring out how the molecule works.”
Stem cells are important because they do two unique things1) self-renew, producing more stem cells and 2) differentiate, becoming other, more specialized cell types. To obtain a large number of a certain cell type, such as heart cells, the hard part is figuring out the signals that direct them to become the desired cell type.
To find a synthetic molecule that might one day lead to a drug therapy to regenerate the heart, experts used sophisticated robotic technology to methodically test a large collection of drug-like chemicals that, when added to stem cells, results in cardiomyocytes. The winning compound was ITD-1. The next step is to test the molecule in animal models with heart attack. There’s no shortage of therapeutic possibilities for ITD-1.
“This particular molecule could be useful to enhance stem cell differentiation in a damaged heart,” explained Erik Willems, Ph.D., postdoctoral researcher in Mercola’s lab and first author of the study. “At some point, it could become the basis for a new therapeutic drug for cardiovascular diseaseone that would likely limit scar spreading in heart failure and promote new muscle formation.”
SOURCE: Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute August 2012, Interview with Mark Mercola Ph.D