Adult Stem Cells Rebuild Alabama Woman's Heart

Noncontroversial research wins another convert.

Alabama event planner Carron Morrow was hanging Japanese lanterns for a wedding last summer when she suffered her fourth heart attack. A week later, the doctor told the 58-year-old mother of two she was a walking time bomb: The right side of her heart was functioning at less than 50 percent. They tried stents and a defibrillator. Then she was put on the heart transplant list. "All I could do was cry," she says. "I just thought, 'I'm about to die.' There's 100,000 people waiting for a heart." By fall, she grew worse. "I couldn't walk 20 feet without being on somebody's arm," Morrow says. "I couldn't go to the mall. My legs just wouldn't carry me. I knew I had really gotten worse." Her church rallied around her. "Each time I've had one of these heart attacks, the church has surrounded me in prayer," she says.

'I started praying'

Morrow's nurse from her third heart attack had been researching adult stem-cell therapy and came across a groundbreaking study at the Texas Heart Institute. Her health records were sent to Texas. "Within a month's time, I was in Texas," she says. But just 30 people would be admitted to the study: 20 would receive stem-cell therapy, and 10 would receive a placebo. "I started praying," Morrow says. "They called me at a quarter to five." She would be part of the research that began in Brazil more than a decade ago. First, she had to sign liability papers for the surgery, which is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

"My next choice was just to drop dead, so I signed everything," she says, "and had full confidence in that group." On Oct. 14, 2006 — her birthday — she went into surgery. Doctors removed about 50cc of bone marrow from her left hip. Then the cells were cultivated. Four hours later, she was back in surgery, where 30 million stem cells were injected into the right side of her heart. Morrow stayed in Texas for nine days and returned every two weeks through January. A local businessman, for whom she had catered, paid for all of her plane trips.

'I could sing a whole song'

"I knew within two months something was going on," Morrow says. "I could sing a whole song at church." By December, she "was plating food as hard as any other chef there." In April, "I had a huge wedding in Jackson, Mississippi. We put in 80 hours that week. My sister said, 'Carron, you know you have the stem cells.' " The following week in Texas, it was confirmed: "This little bitty envelope had 'stem cell' in it." This month, she returned to the University of Alabama, where she had received dire news just a year ago. She had another CT scan to see how her heart was functioning. "The doctor calls and says, 'Ma'am, the right side of your heart is normal.'" She thought he had the tests messed up and had the report faxed to Montgomery. "I was in la-la land for several days."

PBS featured her on a documentary that aired June 7. "I told the doctor, 'I don't understand why we have this huge political mess going on about stem cells,'" Morrow says. "I'm living proof that adult stem cells work far better than embryonic. And why should embryonic even be in discussion? "I'm here to say, 'I'm living proof. It saved my life.' "I'm just doing great." She doesn't even need her $85,000 defibrillator anymore. The cost to culture the stem cells, Morrow says: Less than $600. "This is going to revolutionize heart disease. "This community has been such a strength for me," she says. "I am just so blessed. I feel so undeserving. I am not a perfect person. I just am overwhelmed with how good God is to me. "I have been given an opportunity … it just blows me away, at how good God is, even when we don't deserve it. I am very, very grateful. "I hope God lets me shout it from the rooftop, 'Your own stem cells work.' "I am just so excited about the study of stem cells, the possibilities."

Stem cells may mend a broken heart

Stem cells may help repair damaged tissue after a heart attack, according to a team of American researchers. The study, which was done on mice, shows that stem cells play a limited, but significant role in repairing damaged hearts. However, it remains unclear whether it is heart cells that are doing the repair, or cells from elsewhere in the body. Richard Lee of the Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues genetically engineered mice so their heart muscle cells could be stained with a fluorescent protein. Around 80 per cent of the heart muscle cells in young mice picked up the stain. As the mice aged, this level remained the same, which the researchers say demonstrates that heart muscle cells are not normally replaced in life. However, when they induced heart attacks in the mice, the number of stained cells dropped to 70 per cent, suggesting that new muscle cells are formed in response to injury.

'Circumstantial evidence'

Lee thinks the study shows that the adult mouse heart has a limited ability to repair itself. "The mechanism to activate cardiac regeneration is present, but it's inadequate," he says. "Could that be because mammals don't have enough [heart] stem cells? There are other theories as well. We need to understand what is holding the system back, so that we can devise a strategy to turn that brake off." But Kenneth Chien of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston thinks the paper raises as many questions as answers. Heart stem cells were first discovered last year, but he is not yet convinced that Lee's team have identified heart stem cells in the mice. "The evidence is circumstantial because the data is not related to finding the pool of new cells and tagging it, but simply showing that the existing pool changes," Chien says. "The most important question now is: can you identify that new pool? Are they pre-existing immature cardiac muscle cells? Or are they [stem cells] from the heart or elsewhere in the body?"

Journal reference: Nature Medicine (DOI: 10.1038/nm1618).

Stem cells 'could repair heart attack damage'

A new system is being developed that uses stem cells to repair the damage caused by heart attacks. Stem cells are the focus of many research projects due to their ability to develop into other cells in the body. Researchers at the University of Nottingham are looking at how a stem cell turns itself into a cardiomyocyte – the beating cell that makes up a heart. Their system will monitor the cardiomyocytes during this transition, using electrophysiology to record the electrical properties in a cell. By providing more detailed information on this electrical activity, the researchers hope it will help in the long term to use the stem cells in regenerating the damaged hearts of heart attack patients.

"This research will enable rapid development of stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes as a tool for understanding the heart and its diseases," said Dr Chris Denning of Nottingham University. "But before we can consider using stem cells to treat heart-attack patients there are many problems which will take many years to solve. We don't yet know how to deliver the cells to a patient's heart and prevent them being washed away so that they actually stay in the heart and both survive and function. "It will take many years to overcome these challenges and put stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes into medical usage."

System To Analyze Beating Heart Stem Cells Could Lead To Heart Attack Treatments

New research at the University of Nottingham, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), is paving the way for techniques that use stem cells to repair the damage caused by heart attacks. The research, highlighted in the new issue of BBSRC Business, is looking at the process that turns a stem cell into a cardiomyocyte -- the beating cell that makes up the heart. The Nottingham researchers are developing a new system to monitor cardiomyocytes in real time as they differentiate from stem cells into beating heart cells. The system uses electrophysiology to record the electrical properties in a cell and will be the first time it has been used to study cardiomyocyte cells in the UK. The researchers hope that their research could provide more detailed information on the electrical activity of stem cell derived cardiomyocytes. In the longer term, this could facilitate their use in regenerating the damaged hearts of heart attack victims.

"Human embryonic stem cells promise unrivalled opportunities. However, they are difficult, time-consuming and expensive to grow in the lab", Dr Denning explains. "Our understanding of how to convert them into cardiomyocytes is poor. At the moment we only know how to produce a few million cardiomyocytes, but to treat just one heart attack patient, we may need one billion that all function in the correct way." To help overcome the many challenges that stem cells bring, Dr Denning and his team plan to engineer a novel system for real-time analysis of cardiomyocytes during early development so their properties are better understood. The team have already demonstrated that sufficient numbers of stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes can be produced for detailed analysis and they plan to use new 'electrophysiology' systems to record changes in the cells when cultured. Electrophysiology is the study of cells' electrical properties and this is the first time that the method has been used in the UK to study stem cell-cardiomyocyte biology.

"This research will enable rapid development of stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes as a tool for understanding the heart and its diseases," says Dr Denning. However, he cautions: "Before we can consider using stem cells to treat heart-attack patients there are many problems which will take many years to solve. We don't yet know how to deliver the cells to a patient's heart and prevent them being washed away so that they actually stay in the heart and both survive and function. It will take many years to overcome these challenges and put stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes into medical usage." The researchers will also be monitoring how the cells respond to different pharmacological agents in order to improve drug-screening processes and reduce the need for animal testing. "A key part of the project is to monitor the effects of different drugs on the cells. At present, only limited information is available on how they respond to pharmacological or gene modulating agents.

"Between 1990 and 2001, 8 different drugs were withdrawn from the market in the USA at an estimated cost of $8billion because they caused unexpected deaths in several hundred patients. Our aim is to reduce such occurrences by having better test methods to test the drugs before they reach the clinic. "By studying the drugs' effects on the heart cells in the lab, this could reduce the need for animals in clinical trials." Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

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