UCSD Researchers Discover Protein That Can Help Damaged Hearts

This motivated researchers to create a protein patch and apply it to the surface of mouse and pig hearts that had undergone an experimental form of myocardial infarction or “heart attack”.

But studies of zebra fish have shown that stimulating the epicardium, a sac of fibrous tissue surrounding the heart, can theoretically trigger heart regeneration.

Researchers from UC San Diego and Stanford have identified a molecule that helps heart muscle cells regenerate after a heart attack.

Within two to four weeks of receiving the patch, heart muscle cells began to proliferate and the animals progressively recovered heart function.

Researches say it might be possible to test the patch in human clinical trials as early as 2017.

Vast majority of people survive a heart attack instantly, but the extensive damage to the muscle and blemishing that consequences takes a toll which ultimately leads to a heart failure in the upcoming days.

UC San Diego professor of bioengineering Mark Mercola said there are a handful of other molecules that can stimulate heart muscle cells to regenerate. He adds, “It’s commercially viable, clinically attractive and you don’t need immunosuppressive drugs”.

While providing more information on the treatment, Dr Pilar Ruiz-Lozano, researcher from Stanford University in the United States and lead author of the study, said, “This finding opens the door to a completely revolutionary treatment”.

Though the protein occurs naturally in healthy hearts, it becomes depleted in a key layer of the heart after an attack. The researchers joined forces to find a solution. They then screened a number of these candidates using high throughput assays to look for the ones that had the same activity as the cells, and found that only one did the job: Follistatin-like 1 (FSTL1).

Stanford has a patent on the patch, and Ruiz-Lozano is chief scientific officer at Epikabio Inc., which has an unique choice to license this expertise. The patch has the elasticity of fetal heart tissue and slowly releases the protein. “It’s a hospitable environment”.

Heart attacks caused the blood flow in the left ventricle of pig’s hearts to drop from a rate of 50 percent to 30 percent. In mice and pigs, suffering heart attack, the protein was restored through a bioengineered collagen patch that was attached to tissue of heart. Researchers implanted the patch within a week of the heart attack.