Skip to contents
In This Issue:
As BWH opens new doors to cardiovascular care at the Carl J. and Ruth Shapiro Cardiovascular Center, one team of BWHers is researching new ways to regenerate parts of the heart that have shut down due to heart failure.
Piero Anversa, MD, and his team are working to regenerate myocardial cells damaged from heart failure. The group has identified cardiac stem cells, known as cardiac progenitor cells, which could generate growth of heart muscle cells and the coronary arteries that feed them.
“We’ve been working on this for 20 years but only with stem cells since in the late 1990s,” said Anversa, who brought 17 members of his team to BWH from New York in December. “We’re close to forming vessels and cardiac muscle that could be used in a biological bypass.”
In such a procedure, patients could be injected with their own cardiac stem cells around a blocked artery, and those cells would grow into a new cardiac artery bypassing the blockage to restore blood flow. Despite the best preventive measures and modern technology including risk factor modification, bypass and angioplasty, many patients remain severely disabled from progressive coronary artery disease.
“It is hoped that this approach will allow patients to improve their intrinsic repair system to restore blood flow and muscle contraction. However, with the start of any innovative therapy, the initial evaluations will be in patients who need help despite best current available approaches. As with any novel promising approach, rigorous scientific testing will be required to find the optimal place of this new biologic approach,” said Marc Pfeffer, MD, PhD, BWH senior physician and HMS professor of medicine.
The FDA has approved a Phase I clinical trial to test the behavior of the human cardiac progenitor cells grown in Anversa’s laboratory. The team has published several papers demonstrating the abilities of these cardiac stem cells and their potential to generate the growth of new cardiac arteries and muscle.
Anversa and his team have hopes of extending life expectancy, too, by adding to the arsenal of treatment options for heart failure, which is the leading cause of death among the elderly.
“We are asking if heart failure is interfering with the genetic clock,” said Anversa, who tested small animals that developed heart failure through normal aging and found correcting heart failure using the regenerated cells expanded the life expectancy in senescent animals by 44 percent.
“Bringing Dr. Anversa and his impressive team to the Brigham highlights our focus and commitment to being at the forefront for the most innovative and clinically transforming science,” said Pfeffer.