| VA STUDIES
HEART-HEALING PATCH
"The main focus is to get new heart muscle cells into the heart
because of its lack of ability to repair itself."
NOTE from
Larry Scott, VA Watchdog dot Org
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VA study:
heart-healing patch
By Dale Quinn
Arizona Daily Star
Researchers at Tucson's veterans
hospital are developing a patch that could one day act as a living
bandage helping to heal people's damaged heart muscles.
Dr. Steven Goldman, chief of
cardiology for the Southern Arizona VA Health Care System, is
leading the research.
"We've been doing work with
heart failure for years; we have a specific interest in developing
new treatments," Goldman said.
The patch — which is the
intellectual property of San Francisco-based Theregen Inc., a
regenerative-medicine company — is a biodegradable mesh structure
covered in living fibroblast cells. Those cells secrete
hormonelike growth factors that stimulate other cells to grow,
Goldman said.
Researchers put the patch on
rats with heart failure to see if it could improve the organ's
functions and discovered it works reasonably well right after a
heart attack, Goldman said.
"What we're trying to do now is
make it work better in rats with chronic heart failure," said
Goldman, who also is associated with the University of
 Arizona
Sarver Heart Center.
The funding comes primarily from
an annual grant of $135,000 from the VA Merit Review Program of
Washington, D.C., Goldman said.
The benefit of this new step in
cardiology is important to veterans as well as to the public at
large, VA spokesman Pepe Mendoza said.
"It's cutting-edge research that
could extend the lives of your loved ones," he said.
Jordan Lancaster, a pre-doctoral
fellow who works in Goldman's lab, said they are now working on
getting the patch to repopulate the left ventricular wall with new
heart cells after an injury. The left ventricle pumps oxygenated
blood throughout the body.
The patches are seeded with
cardiomyocytes, or heart muscle cells, and then implanted onto the
heart. The idea is to get the muscle cells to start communicating
with native tissues in a way that allows for rhythmic,
synchronized contractions, Lancaster said.
"The main focus is to get new
heart muscle cells into the heart because of its lack of ability
to repair itself," Lancaster said. With chronic heart failure,
which usually occurs after a heart attack, those cells can become
like scar tissue, so the idea is to regenerate them, the
researchers said.
Still, it's difficult to say
when people might benefit from the living, beating bandage,
Goldman said.
The patch itself, without the
cardiomyocytes, is in Phase 1 of clinical patient trials, Goldman
said. Those trials are in patients with coronary artery bypass
grafting and patients in end-stage heart failure who have a left
ventricular assist device.
The seeded patches — with the
heart muscle cells added — aren't in the clinical trial phase yet.
So far, Goldman said he and his research team are working to see
if the patch will work on a live rat. For human use, the patch
would require embryonic or human cardiac stem cells, he said.
Goldman said the research has
been a community effort with students from the University of
Arizona and high schoolers from the BASIS Tucson charter school.
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TOPICS:
veterans, veterans' benefits, VA, Department of Veterans' Affairs,
heart patch |
