Novel Stem Cell Therapy From Bone Marrow May Help Heart Patient

Stem cells can cure chronic heart failure, says a new study. In a phase II clinical trial, scientists found that with ixmyelocel-T, which is a therapy harvesting stem cells taken from a patient's bone marrow, they can bring down the complications of a patient's heart if he suffers severe heart failure.

It was explained by lead researcher Amit Patel of the University of Utah School of Medicine.

"This is the first trial of cell therapy showing that it can have a meaningful impact on the lives of patients with heart failure," explained Patel. "For the last 15 years, everyone has been talking about cell therapy and what it can do. These results suggest that it really works."

In the new study, for 12 months, scientists studied 109 patients with ischemic cardiomyopathy. In this disease, the heart muscles, especially the main heart muscle, the left ventricle, becomes weak due to heart attacks. It narrows the arteries or coronary heart disease. Scientists gave 58 patients the stem cell therapy and 51 a placebo.

For the stem cell treatment, ixmyelocel-T was gathered from bone marrow samples of patients, sent to a laboratory where some cells were extracted and then put into a bioreactor to multiply and improve the quality of the collected stem cells. They were then extracted after a fortnight and injected into the heart muscles with the help of a catheter.

"Our intent is to increase the number of functioning cells in the heart muscle, which, in turn, strengthen the heart and result in alleviating or slowing the advance of severe heart failure," said Dr. Timothy D. Henry, co-author of the study and director of the Cardiology Division at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute.

Interestingly, patients who got the stem cell therapy showed 37 percent lower rates of death, hospitalizations and worsening of cardiac symptoms compared to others on the placebo.

Scientists found that only 3.4 percent of patients experiencing stem cell treatment died compared to 13.7 percent of those who received the placebo. About 37.9 percent of patients who received the stem cell treatment got admitted to the hospital showing heart problems compared to 49 percent of patients in the placebo group.

"This is an important step forward for heart patients in particular and for stem cell medicine in general," Henry concluded. "The results indicate that stem cells could be ushering in a bright new era in heart failure treatments."

While stem cell therapy has a promising future, much more research is called for.

"The study is very exciting because for the first time it showed a physical impact on clinical events, and, in this case, that was mortality and rehospitalization for heart failure," wrote Dr. Thomas Povsic, an interventional cardiologist and associate professor of the Duke Clinical Research Institute, according to an accompanying editorial.

"Although the study is very encouraging, it's still a relatively small study by cardiovascular standards. In heart disease we typically study hundreds to thousands of patients," he added.

The latest findings were published in the journal The Lancet.