Scarring Post Heart Attack Can Be Treated With New Protein Patch To Stimulate Tissue Regeneration

One protein can actually help heart muscle cells to regenerate after a heart attack, found scientists. A patch packed with these proteins can be placed directly on the heart, greatly improving cardiac function and survival in mice as well as pigs, according to hngn.

The protein patch can be tested on humans in 2017, reported the University of California, San Diego. In four to eight weeks, animal models that suffered due to heart attacks were treated with the patch, and returned to normalcy in just four to eight weeks.

"We are really excited about the prospect of bringing this technology to the clinic," said Mark Mercola, professor of Bioengineering at UC San Diego and professor in the Development, Aging, and Regeneration Program at SBP. "It's commercially viable, clinically attractive and you don't need immunosuppressive drugs."

As the protein called Follistatin-like 1 (FSTL1) that could stoke the cultured heart cell muscles to divide, the animals suffering from heart attacks were given the patch in order to make these proteins applicable, so that they could rebuild the heart tissue that had been affected and bring down 'scarring'.

"Treatments don't deal with this fundamental problem--and consequently many patients progressively lose heart function, leading to long-term disability and eventually death," said Stanford University researcher Pilar Ruiz-Lozano.

Most of the time, scarring following heart attacks makes it tougher for the heart to pump blood, leading on to heart failure. About half the heart failure patients die in some five to six years.

Even though it is easier for the heart to pump blood with treatment, it can not regenerate the heart's tissue.

Scientists learnt by observing how fish "naturally regenerate heart tissue by producing regenerative compounds in the heart's outer layer". Checking out the epicardial cells showed the team that they could help the existing heart muscle cells to replicate. They also created a therapeutic patch made out of collagen along with the protein FSTL1.

"It could act like a cell nursery," Ruiz-Lozano said. "It's a hospitable environment. Over time, it gets remodeled and becomes vascularized as new muscle cells come in."

The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Nature.