Heart attack patient Ken Milles is the first ever human to undergo a procedure in which his own heart tissue was used to grow specialized heart stem cells that were then injected back into his heart in an effort to repair and re-grow healthy muscle that had been injured by a heart attack. Photo Credit: Video GrabJune 30, 2009, (Sawf News) - Heart attack patient Ken Milles is the first ever human to undergo a procedure in which his own heart tissue was used to grow specialized heart stem cells that were then injected back into his heart in an effort to repair and re-grow healthy muscle that had been injured by a heart attack.
The minimally-invasive procedure was completed on Friday, June 26.
Designed by Dr. Eduardo Marbán of Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, the procedure is part of a Phase I investigative study approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and supported by the Specialized Centers for Cell-based Therapies at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation.
“Five years ago, we didn’t even know the heart had its own distinct type of stem cells. Now we are exploring how to harness such stem cells to help patients heal their own damaged heart,” said said Eduardo.
The study is directed by the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, with the collaboration of the Johns Hopkins University, where Dr. Marbán worked prior to joining Cedars-Sinai in 2007. The 24 patients participating in the study have hearts that were damaged and scarred by heart attacks. Once enrolled in the study, patients go through a three-step procedure.
After undergoing extensive imaging so doctors can pinpoint the exact location and severity of the scars wrought by the heart attack, the patient undergoes a minimally-invasive biopsy, with local anesthesia. Using a catheter inserted through a vein in the patient’s neck, doctors remove a small piece of heart tissue, about half the size of a raisin.
The heart tissue is then taken to a specialized lab at Cedars-Sinai, where heart stem cells are cultured using methods invented by Marbán and his team. It takes about four weeks for the cells to multiply to numbers sufficient for therapeutic use, approximately 10 to 25 million.
In the third and final step, the now-multiplied stem cells are re-introduced into the patient’s coronary arteries during a second catheter procedure.
All patients in the study had to have experienced heart attacks within four weeks prior to enrolling in the research project. Four patients will receive 12.5 million stem cells and two patients will serve as controls. Later this summer, it is anticipated that 12 more patients will undergo procedures to receive 25 million stem cells, while six additional patients will be monitored as controls.
Kenneth Milles is a 39-year-old controller for a small construction company in the San Fernando Valley. He experienced a heart attack on May 10 due to a 99 percent blockage in the left anterior descending artery, a major artery of the heart. Milles’ heart attack left 21 percent of his heart muscle infarcted, or scarred. He underwent his biopsy May 24 and received his infusion of stem cells on June 29.
The patients will be monitored for six months. Complete results are scheduled to be available in late-2010.
Studies over the past eight years have shown that more than 500 cardiac patients have experienced modest improvement when treated with bone marrow stem cells.
However, bone marrow stem cells are not predestined to regenerate heart muscle. When cardiac stem cells were discovered five years ago by various teams worldwide, Marbán began developing a method for isolating heart stem cells from minimally-invasive biopsies and then multiplying the cells. Unlike bone marrow cells, heart stem cells are naturally programmed to regrow heart tissue, so they could prove more effective in healing the injury caused by heart attacks.
“If successful, we hope the procedure could be widely available in a few years and could be more broadly applied to cardiac patients,” Marbán said. For example, if patients are able to re-grow damaged heart muscle via stem cell therapy, there could be lesser demand for expensive and risky treatments such as heart transplants.
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