Heart failure is a long-term condition that affects millions of people around the world. It does not mean the heart has stopped working.
Instead, it means the heart cannot pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs. When this happens, people may feel tired, short of breath, or find it difficult to exercise or even carry out simple daily tasks.
One common form is heart failure with reduced pumping ability, where the heart muscle becomes too weak to push blood around the body efficiently. Although several medicines can slow the disease and help people live longer, many patients continue to get worse over time, creating an urgent need for better treatments.
Some medicines are designed to make the heart beat more strongly. While these drugs can improve heart function for a short time, they may also increase the risk of dangerous heart rhythm problems or cause unwanted changes in blood pressure. Because of these concerns, scientists have been searching for new medicines that strengthen the heart in safer ways.
Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have now reported encouraging early results for an experimental medicine called AC01. The findings were published in The Lancet. Unlike older medicines, AC01 works by targeting the ghrelin receptor.
Ghrelin is a hormone best known for helping regulate appetite, metabolism, and growth hormone release, but scientists have also discovered that its receptor is present in heart muscle cells. Researchers believe activating this receptor may improve the heart’s pumping ability without causing many of the side effects seen with traditional medicines.
The clinical trial was an early Phase Ib/IIa study designed mainly to test safety. A total of 58 people with stable chronic heart failure and reduced pumping function took part.
Participants were randomly assigned to receive different doses of AC01 or an inactive placebo for either seven or twenty-eight days. Because neither the patients nor many of the researchers knew who received the real medicine, the study reduced the risk of bias.
The results were reassuring. The researchers found that AC01 was generally safe and well tolerated. No serious side effects related to the medicine were reported. Importantly, the team found no evidence that the drug caused dangerous changes in heart rhythm or blood pressure.
Early measurements also suggested that the heart pumped more blood with each beat and that overall blood flow from the heart increased. These findings suggest the medicine may improve heart function, although the study was not designed to prove long-term benefits.
Professor Lars Lund, a cardiologist at Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital, said the results support moving forward with larger studies. Future trials will need to include many more patients and follow them for much longer to determine whether AC01 can reduce hospital admissions, improve quality of life, or help patients live longer.
This research involved scientists and doctors from several European countries, showing how international collaboration can speed up the development of new treatments.
This study provides encouraging evidence that AC01 appears to be safe during short-term use in people with chronic heart failure. That is an important first step because every new medicine must prove its safety before researchers can test whether it truly improves health. However, only 58 patients participated and treatment lasted no more than four weeks.
This means the study cannot show whether the drug reduces deaths, prevents hospitalizations, or remains safe over many months or years. The improvements in heart function are promising but should be viewed as early signals rather than proof of effectiveness. Larger Phase III trials will be needed before AC01 could become part of routine medical care.
If you care about heart health, please read studies about how eating eggs can help reduce heart disease risk, and Vitamin K2 could help reduce heart disease risk.
For more information about heart health, please see recent studies about how to remove plaques that cause heart attacks, and results showing a new way to prevent heart attacks, strokes.
Source: Karolinska Institutet.
