For the first time scientists have succeeded in taking skin cells from heart failure patients and transforming them into healthy, beating heart tissue.
The research opens up the possibility of one day being able to use skin to grow the kinds of cells that could repair their own damaged organs.
This latest research was published in the European Heart Journal and comes from researchers based in Haifa, Israel.
The team from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology took skin cells from two men in their 50's and 60's who had heart failure. They then transformed the skin cells into what are called "human induced pluripotent stem cells" (hiPSCs), by adding three genes and a molecule called valproic acid.
The researchers were then able to guide the resulting stem cells to become heart muscle cells, called cardiomyocytes.
Next, they grew the cells in a laboratory dish together with existing cardiac tissue and were able to turn those cells into actual beating heart muscle tissue.
In the final step, the researchers took the new tissue and transplanted it into healthy rat hearts and watched it start to establish connections with the cells in the rats' heart tissue.
Dr. Peter Zandstra, a leading stem cell scientist with the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine, who was not involved in this research, says this study is exciting for a number of reasons.
Firstly, Zandstra says he's excited by the idea of creating heart cells from one's own skin cells.
"The reason it's important is because for the first time, we have the potential of having heart cells that are genetically matched to the patients that need them," he told CTV's Canada AM Wednesday.
That aspect offers the potential to bypass the issues of immune reactions and organ rejection, he said.
Next, he says this is the first study to show that healthy hiPSCs can be obtained from elderly and diseased patients. Previous studies have typically focused only on young and healthy people.
The third aspect that is exciting is that the "cocktail" that was added to the skin cells to turn them into hiPSCs did not include a problematic gene called c-Myc. That gene has been shown to help create stem cells but can also cause the resulting cells to form tumours
"One of the things they've done in this study – and it is similar to what is going on at the McEwen Centre here in Toronto – is they've figured out how to induce these cells without using the genes or factors that change the cells and make them dangerous," Zandstra said.
He notes that stem cell researchers are getting "very good" at learning how to control stem cells so that they don't create cells that become cancerous.
"What this group has done is… to learn how to guide the differentiation of these cells into heart cells so that they can no longer form into other cell types," he said.
As exciting as the research is, there are still a number of challenges that need to be overcome before it can be tested in humans.
Firstly, researchers will have to learn how to grow the large number of heart cells that would be needed for any heart disease therapy. They also have to learn how to ensure the cells become precisely the right kinds that are appropriate for the heart. And the third hurdle that needs to be crossed is learning how to compel the heart cells to integrate with diseased hearts, in order to repair them.
"We're still five to 10 years from this particular cell transplant therapy being used in patients. But there are a lot of exciting things that are happening along the way," Zandstra said.
