Scientists are working on turning back the clock on human hearts, allowing patients to grow new heart muscle even after cardiac injury.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, these treatments could represent new hope for patients with heart disease, even after suffering a heart attack.
However, scientists still have a lot to prove, and clinical trials of such treatments in humans are still many years out. Whether any of them turn out into viable ways to treat heart disease, the leading cause of death in the US, remains to be seen.
However, early animal trials are proving to be promising, offering a glimpse of a future in which we could undo heart damage that's currently seen as irreversible.
One approach involves using microRNA to force cardiac cells to start to multiply again. Early experiments by researchers at King's College London involving pigs showed that such a therapy could improve the heart's pumping function, but researchers are still investigating a more effective delivery method.
Other scientists at Scripps Research are using drugs that target proteins that are responsible for cell growth, with the goal of inducing patients' hearts to physically grow larger, as the WSJ notes. Early trials involving mice and pics saw the animals' heart-pumping capacity almost go back to normal after suffering a heart attack.
Some researchers are also working on stem cell therapies that can grow new heart cells, which can then be grafted onto a damaged heart, encouraging it to "remuscularize." University of Southern California stem cell researcher Chuck Murry and his colleagues recently found that their stem cell treatment allowed macaques' hearts to regain full pumping function.
But as the WSJ reports, Murry and his team found that the new cells caused arrhythmias because they were beating to their own rhythms.
Nonetheless, he's hoping to kick off human clinical trials as soon as 2026.
"Society has become OK with the notion of dying from heart disease," he told the WSJ. "It does not have to be this way, because we can do something about this now."
A more experimental approach involves growing entire "personalized" hearts in a lab using cultured human stem cells. Doris Taylor, the CEO of a biotech company called Organamet Bio, told the newspaper that she's hoping to kick off human clinical trials in about five years.
It's possible that none of these treatments will pan out. But it's a promising new avenue of research — and one that just might make a dent in the leading cause of hospitalizations in the US in the not-so-distant future.
More on hearts: Scientists Puzzled to Find Plastic Fragments Inside Human Hearts
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