WIKIPEDIA, DANALACHEIn numerous clinical trials, researchers have injected patients with various types of progenitor cells to help heal injured hearts. In some cases, subjects have ended up with better cardiac function, but exactly how has been a subject of disagreement among scientists. According to study on rats published this week (February 2) in Circulation Research, the introduced cells themselves don’t do the job by proliferating to create new muscle.
“These cells do not become adult cardiac myocytes,” said study coauthor Roberto Bolli, a cardiac cell therapy researcher at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. “So the mechanism is clearly a paracrine action, where the cells release ‘something’ which makes the heart better. And the million-dollar question now is, ‘What is the something?’”
Bolli’s team investigated the fate of so-called c-kit+ cells, progenitors harvested from the heart and named for the presence of a particular kinase. These cells have been the source of a long debate about their role in building cardiac muscle, with some studies finding no evidence of them producing new cardiomyocytes in vivo and others concluding that, if the conditions are right, c-kit cells do indeed make heart muscle.
C-kit cells ...
