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Scientists Create Heart Patches To Repair Damage, Offering Hope For Heart Failure Patients

The heart patches, created from reprogrammed blood cells, improve heart function by stabilizing and strengthening muscle tissue. Tested in monkeys and patients, they offer a promising alternative to heart transplants.

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Scientists Create Heart Patches To Repair Damage, Offering Hope For Heart Failure Patients

Researchers have just made a major breakthrough in heart failure treatment, developing implantable patches made of beating heart muscle, which can be an alternative to heart transplants. It is at such a time when heart failure is affecting over 64 million people worldwide, conditions such as heart attacks and coronary artery disease resulting in the necessity for a transplant.

The patches would be made up of reprogrammed blood cells that act more like stem cells and have a potential to making the heart to contract more properly. These are converted into cardiac muscle and connective tissue; then grown up into hexagonal patches, later embedded in gelatinous sheets of collagen and attached to about 5 by 10 centimeters membrane before being implanted directly into the myocardium. This patch is able to improve failing heart function.

Dr Ingo Kutschka, University Medical Center Gottingen, Germany explained that such patches could potentially stabilize and make heart muscle more resilient. “These are the first biological heart transplant,” Dr Kutschka said, “The muscles within the patch resemble those found in a heart from a donor that is between four to eight years old,” and it will not cause the tumors or the abnormal heart rhythm which can develop in some direct injections of the heart muscle cells.

The patches have been tested in healthy monkeys and those with heart failure, and they showed remarkable improvements in heart function and wall thickness. Patches have already been implanted in 15 patients in clinical trials, and the results are very promising. The team is hopeful that this technology will offer a treatment option for patients with advanced heart failure who are otherwise facing palliative care.

Further studies are necessary, but already experts such as Prof. Sian Harding of Imperial College London are describing the work as “groundbreaking”.