Posted on 05/23/2007 7:34:12 PM PDT by Coleus
TONY EASTLEY: If you're over 65, chances are you or your spouse has coronary artery disease. One in two older Australians have the condition and heart disease is still the number one cause of premature death and disability in this country. Scientists have already managed to create heart tissue that beats, and they believe stem cells could be the missing piece of a puzzle that will finally allow them to make a new heart muscle from a person's own tissue.
Jane Cowan reports.
JANE COWAN: One of the things that makes heart disease so difficult to treat is that heart tissue doesn't recover well from injury. When someone has a heart attack, the tissue scars and the heart can't produce new cells to replace the damaged ones. But now scientists have discovered stem cells within the heart that they didn't know were there - cells they might be able to stimulate with hormones to produce new heart tissue.
Doctor Robert Graham is the Executive Director of the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney.
ROBERT GRAHAM: The challenge now is to understand why it is, that if we do have stem cells, why are they poor at repairing heart injury that occurs as in at heart attack? And what can we do to encourage those cells to do a better job?
JANE COWAN: What sort of treatments might eventually result from this work? Would it be a case of drug therapy to stimulate stem cells? Or, how would it work?
ROBERT GRAHAM: There are two approaches. One, as I suggested, is to try and harvest or gather those stem cells, either from bone marrow or from the heart itself, and either directly inject them into the heart or grow them in culture first and make more cells and then inject into the heart. And the other possibility is that you can give hormones or drugs, which stimulate the stem cells so they come out of the bone marrow and get into the circulation. They then may go to the heart, which needs to have a stem cell, and may allow repair to occur.
JANE COWAN: And that's not the only way stem cells could help heart patients. Dr Wayne Morrison is Professor of Surgery at St Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne and another of several scientists who'll gather there today to discuss the role of stem cells in treating heart disease. His team has already managed to grow cardiac muscle that spontaneous beats and could be used to patch up a damaged heart.
WAYNE MORRISON: Well the great hope of stem cells is that you can derive them from the individual who needs the tissue, so you then avoid the problems of rejection. One of the problems obviously with the technique we've used is that firstly you have to get donor heart tissue and it would be essentially foreign material. So you would have to have the patient on some form of immunosuppression drugs.
JANE COWAN: The frustrating news for heart patients though, is that it could take five to 10 years for any of this potential to translate into treatments.
TONY EASTLEY: Jane Cowan.
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