More people survive heart attacks now than ever before. And that is great news, even though these people continue living with damaged hearts. Scientists at UCL are working on new methods to repair them.
One of the more promising techniques would be a stem cell therapy to repair damaged tissues. But how can these cells be delivered to the heart? Maybe with injectable spheres?
Heart disease may soon be treated with injectable microspheres. It could be a life-saving solution for some. Image credit: Mikael Häggström via Wikimedia
The ability of stem cells to repair damaged tissues has been researched for a number of years already. And this therapy has a strong promise. However, delivering those cells to the heart is quite tricky, especially because they don’t stay alive for a very long time to deliver the desired results. But scientists have a creative idea on how to improve the effectiveness of stem cell therapy.
Scientists grew human stem cell-derived heart cells on tiny microspheres. These tiny, such a quarter of a millimetre wide balls were engineered from biological material, which is, of course, biodegradable. These microspheres improve the stem cell delivery to the heart tissue and allow these cells to survive for longer. In a laboratory setting they were able to beat for up to 40 days in a dish. And because these microspheres are so small, they could be injected into the heart muscle using a needle.
On the other hand, the microscopic size of these spheres means that it is difficult to image them. This is why scientists created a new state-of-the-art technology to visualise the injected microspheres. They added barium sulphate (BaSO4) to the spheres, because it shines bright on X-rays and CT scans. This helps confirm that the microspheres reached their intended target and stayed there as they should.
Dr Daniel Stuckey, one of the authors of the study, said: “Our technology provides a new way of ensuring that the cells injected into the heart are working as they should. We hope this research will give us the information essential for making stem cell therapy a realistic treatment for people with heart disease.”
These microspheres will basically act like injectable heart patches. It will be an exciting new treatment option, which will mend damaged hearts after heart attacks. However, you cannot expect it to become available any time soon. This is still a completely new invention and scientists say that these microspheres will be tested in human clinical trials in the next 10 years.
Regardless of the timeline, very soon this will be a very important new therapy, which hopefully will save the lives of millions of people in the world. Heart attacks are very common, but more and more people survive them. Heart damage that they’re experiencing is significant enough to say that their life expectancy is shortened. Hopefully this new stem cell therapy can repair some of that damage.
Source: UCL