Results from an animal study conducted at Johns Hopkins show that stem cell therapy can be used effectively to treat heart attacks, or myocardial infarcts, in pigs. Stem cells taken from another pig's bone marrow, when injected into the animal's damaged heart, were able to restore the heart's function to its original condition.
If further animal studies and human clinical trials prove equally successful, the Johns Hopkins researchers believe this could be a new, widely applicable treatment to repair and reverse the damage done to heart muscle that has been infarcted, or destroyed, after losing its blood supply.
"Among its many benefits are that adult stem cells are readily available, meaning they can be extracted from the patient, no donor is required, and the cells can be simply reproduced if more are needed. In our animal experiment, the treatment regimen was relatively simple, requiring only injection to the damaged tissue. The therapy was extremely effective, allowing for almost complete recovery, with no serious complications, such as immunosuppression, which is a problem in organ transplantation. Now, we need to see how it works in people."
I asked a heart doctor what he thought about this, and he predicted we are at least ten years away from seeing anything like this at UCLA, but it is undoubtedly something which bears watching. It may not save Liz, but if I can get Mason to his teen years, this holds promise.
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