The heart is one of the most important organs of our body, and given the increasingly disappointing growth statistics of cardiovascular diseases, the development of new treatments is extremely important. And recently a group of researchers from Rutgers University have taken an important step to ensure that “to teach the heart to heal yourself”, which should reduce the number of surgical interventions and to improve the lives of people.
According to the editors of Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, the basic principle is the fence of the connective tissue cells of the human heart, “reverse engineered” them into stem cells of the heart, and then “transform” them into heart muscle cells. However, this is not new and a real breakthrough a team of scientists is that the newly created heart muscle cells themselves are connected in a full structure. Normally cardiac cells made this way are not going together and not fight with the same frequency. To achieve this, the researchers used protein CREG.
“The fibroblasts, the connective tissue cells isolated from hearts transformed into stem cells. This was done to ensure that, when the CREG protein was able to influence them and induce differentiation in cells of the same species. Heart failure has reached epidemic proportions. Now the only treatment option is transplantation or the connection of the patient to the artificial heart. We are working to heal the body.”
Although the study is still far from complete, we can already say that the method is quite promising. Protein CREG can, according to the scientists, to create “as much tissue as necessary” for the recovery of the patients. And because new cells are created on the basis of graft rejection there is no fear.
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