Injecting human cardiac muscle cells into monkeys that suffered heart attacks helped the animals’ damaged hearts pump blood better, researchers report July 2 in Nature Biotechnology. The treatment is based on the reprogramming of human embryonic stem cells, and the results move the therapy a step closer to clinical trials.
“We're talking about the number one cause of death in the world [for humans],” study author Charles Murry, director of the Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine at the University of Washington, tells CNN. “And at the moment all of our treatments are . . . dancing around the root problem, which is that you don't have enough muscle cells.”
When a heart attack goes untreated, blood is blocked from flowing to the heart, which leads to the death of heart muscle cells. There can also be scarring and heart failure—when the heart cannot pump enough blood to the ...
