In a new study, researchers found shielding stem cells with a new biomaterial improves their ability to heal heart attack damage.
They showed they could make capsules of wound-healing mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and implant them next to wounded hearts using minimally invasive techniques.
Within four weeks, they saw heart-healing 2.5 times greater in animals treated with shielded stem cells than those treated with non-shielded stem cells.
The research was conducted by a team at Rice University.
Someone has a heart attack every 40 seconds in the United States.
In each case, an artery that supplies blood to the heart becomes blocked and heart muscle tissue dies due to lack of blood.
After a heart attack, hearts pump less efficiently and scar tissue from heart attack wounds can further reduce heart function.
In the study, the team wanted to produce enough wound-healing chemicals called reparative factors at these sites so that damaged tissue is repaired and restored, as healthy tissue, and dead tissue scars don’t form.
Prior studies have shown that MSCs, a type of adult stem cell produced in blood marrow, can promote tissue repair after a heart attack.
But in clinical trials of MSCs, “cell viability has been a consistent challenge. Many of the cells die after transplantation.
Initially, researchers had hoped that stem cells would become heart cells, but that has not appeared to be the case. Rather, the cells release healing factors that enable repair and reduce the extent of the injury.
By utilizing this shielded therapy approach, we aimed to improve this benefit by keeping them alive longer and in greater numbers.
A few MSC lines have received approval for human use, but transplant rejection has contributed to their lack of viability in trials.
The team has spent years developing encapsulation technologies specifically designed not to activate the body’s immune system.
In the study, the team created 1.5-millimeter capsules that each contained about 30,000 MSCs.
They placed several of the capsules alongside wounded sections of the heart muscle in animals that had experienced a heart attack.
The study compared rates of heart healing in animals treated with shielded and unshielded stem cells, as well as an untreated control group.
The researchers say they can deliver the capsules through a catheter port system, and that’s how we imagine they would be administered in a human patient.
More than 800,000 Americans have heart attacks each year, and the team is hopeful that encapsulated MSCs can one day treat some of them.
One author of the study is Omid Veiseh, an assistant professor of bioengineering and CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research.
The study is published in Biomaterials Science.
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