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News
Gene Therapy Improves Heart Stem Cell Treatment
Research has shown that stem cell therapy can re-grow damaged cardiac tissue in patients after a heart attack. However, that same research found the cutting-edge procedure also raised the risk for dangerous heart arrhythmias. Now, a new study suggests that gene therapy can help avoid that danger.
In laboratory research, at team at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore discovered that the source of these arrhythmias were myoblasts, adult stem cells taken from the patients' own healthy skeletal muscle.
Reporting in the June 23 online issue of Circulation Research, the researchers say they minimized arrhythmias by using gene therapy to replace a key protein called connexin 43, which was found to be missing in heart muscle fibers that grew after stem cell transplants. Connexin 43 makes up the gap junctions between heart muscle cells, allowing the cells to communicate and to regularly expand and contract.
They now believe that combining gene therapy with adult stem cell transplantation can go a long way to prevent the development of potentially fatal arrhythmias in patients who will have these myoblast transplants.
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