A group of researchers from University College London made a splash this week with their work prodding heart muscle to repair itself. This is big news, given both the number of people who have heart attacks (more than 1 million per year in the US) and the number of stem cell scientists working to regenerate the damage (23 awards worth $46 million from CIRM).
CIRM grantees at The Gladstone Institutes have, over the past few years, been hard at work learning about the origins of heart deformities by studying how stem cells mature into heart tissue.
(Comment: it appears that we already blogged about this study back in February. It's interesting work, though, so this second blog entry gets to remain.)
We've long claimed that one ideal role for iPS cells is modeling disease and screening drugs. In fact, we're so committed to that idea we produced a video about it with CIRM grantee Bruce Conklin at the Gladstone Institutes. Scientific American also has a story on disease model their March issue, available online.
The LA Times has a timely story in the week leading up to Valentine's day summarizing the role of stem cells in mending a broken heart. There's been a lot of talk - and a lot of money invested -- over the past few years pushing bone marrow stem cells as a tool for repairing damage after heart attack.
 |
Researchers at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute have used magnets to guide cardiac stem cells to damaged areas of animal hearts. In a press release, senior author Eduardo Marban said:
Researchers at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease have identified two molecules, called microRNAs, that push early heart cells to mature into the smooth muscle cells that line blood vessels. These same molecules also control when those smooth muscle cells divide to repair damage or in diseases such as cancer or atherosclerosis, which both involve unhealthy blood vessel growth. The two microRNAs, miR-145 and miR-143, are abundant in the primitive heart cells of prenatal mice, leading those cells to differentiate into various mature heart and aorta cells.
