Health

New Life For Scarred Hearts?

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

August 3, 1998 / 7:34 PM EDT / CBS

At Duke University, researcher Doris Taylor has found a way to fool nature, reports CBS News Correspondent John Roberts.

In experiments with rabbits, she has found a way to take the dead scar tissue from a heart attack and make it live again.

"Nature has provided us with a way to do this and we have finally just gotten smart enough to know how to take advantage of that and exploit it," says Taylor.

At birth, nature gives us pretty much all the heart cells we will ever have. When they're injured -- as in a heart attack -- they die and do not regenerate.

Taylor takes a few cells of muscle from the leg -- muscle that will repair itself -- and grows them in the laboratory. Then she injects them directly into the damaged region of the heart. In rabbit hearts, skeletal muscle cells started acting like heart cells within a few days.

"They, at a minimum improved 40 percent and sometimes would get a 4 times improvement in their ability to squeeze," says Taylor.

Even after a moderate heart attack, the damage done can lead to heart failure. The only currently available option is a heart transplant. But surgeons are hopeful -- if muscle cell transplants work as well in humans as they appear to in animals -- that the need for many heart transplants could be avoided.

"If we can prevent congestive heart failure, you don't need a transplant -- you don't lose your ability to be mobile and you don't lose your ability to function in the world," says Taylor.

Doris Taylor

Taylor hopes to test her treatment in humans waiting for heart transplants within a year -- and many scientists believe that within a decade this approach will become part of the standard therapy for treating a heart attack.