TURNING SCAR TISSUE INTO HEART MUSCLE.
The Osgood File. Sponsored in part by Pure Silk Moisturizing Shave Cream for Women. Made with soothing aloe and fabulous moisturizers to help your legs look and feel like pure silk. This is Charles Osgood.
When heart tissue is damaged by a heart attack, it has a very limited ability to regenerate - to form new heart tissue.
Instead, the response to the damage is scarring - to form scar tissue.
It's been suggested that someday, stem cells might be used to create the same sort of cells that were damaged - cardio muscle cells.
But a team at Duke University has found a simpler way, without having to transplant stem cells: a way of programming the damaged heart to form muscle tissue, instead of scar tissue, in a mouse.
SOT - Dr. Victor Dzau, Duke University - a senior author of the study
"We were able to put into the animal and actually generate cardio muscle cells in the animal, in a live animal, in the beating heart." (:07)
That is Dr. Victor Dzau, who led the Duke team. More from him after this...
((( BREAK )))
There's a big difference, of course, between mice and men.
But in the laboratory, mice have been used for years, because genetically we have so much in common.
What Dr. Dzau and his team at the Duke University Medical Center did was this:
SOT - Dr. Victor Dzau
"To create a genetic program in a cell - in this case, a fibroblast - and then directly switch it to a heart muscle cell. Thereby, we have regenerated - instead of forming a scar - we have regenerated the cardio muscle." (:14)
Now that you've succeeded in doing that, what's the next step?
SOT - Dr. Victor Dzau
"When we optimize this, our next step will be to see whether we have really regenerated in a really significant way the damaged heart - and that the heart is now closer to normal and its function normally." (:11)
And if it does?
SOT - Dr. Victor Dzau
"If that happens, the next stage should be to try a larger animal - and (if) there's no toxicity - given all those things, we should be thinking about human studies." (:09)
This is a whole new way of regenerating tissue, says Dr. Dzau.
And if you can do this in the heart, you should be able to do it in the brain, the kidneys and other tissues.
So far, they've only done it in mice in the lab - but that's where science usually starts.
The Osgood File. This is Charles Osgood on the CBS Radio Network. |
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