Team Effort

Broken hearts don’t mend easily. During a heart attack, some areas can be deprived of oxygen and suffer permanent damage, leaving the heart less able to perform its essential functions. Currently, heart transplants are the only viable cure, but in an ideal world we’d be able to repair, rather than replace. Attempts to transplant restorative cells to lead repair have found limited success, as they don’t last long after insertion, but a new approach has tried transplanting supporting cells derived from stem cells along with the heart muscle material. The combination enabled the muscle cells to grow more reliably, and boosted their ability to contract and relax (right, in a section of tissue with both cell types, compared to heart muscles alone, left). The next step is understanding precisely how these cells support the regeneration, and ultimately step up from testing sections of heart in the lab, to treating patients.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

Website

• Video by Dr. Sanjay Sinha, BHF-funded researcher, University of Cambridge, UK
• The Anne McLaren Laboratory, Wellcome Trust – MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
• Video copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Nature Biotechnology, August 2019