According to a study that was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers at the Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute have discovered a method that could regenerate damaged heart muscle cells in mice, and provide treatment opportunities for the congenital heart defects in children and the heart attack in adults. Hypoplastic heart syndrome, abbreviated as HLHS, is a rare congenital defect caused by the left side of the baby’s heart being unable to develop properly during pregnancy.
This condition is known to affect 1 in 5,000 newborns and is accounable for the 23% of the cardiac deaths in the 1st week of life. Senior Author Paul Schumacker, said, “Cardiomyocytes, the cells responsible for contracting the heart muscles, can regenerate in newborn mammals, but lose its ability with age. At the time of birth, the cardiac muscle cells still can undergo mitotic cell division. For example, if the heart of a newborn mouse is damaged when it’s a day or two old, and then you wait until the mouse is an adult, if you look at the area of the heart that was damaged previously, you’d never know that there was damage there.” Patrick M Ma-goon is a distinguished Professor in Neonatal Research and Paediatrics at Lurie Children’s.
Dr Schumacker and his collaborators are understanding if the adult mammalian cardiomyocytes have the ability to turn back into that regenerative fetal state. As fetal cardiomyocytes can survive on glucose rather than the mitochondrial cellular energy, they deleted the mitochondria-associated gene UQCRFS1 in the hearts of the adult mice, forcing it to return to the fetal-like state. The researchers observed that in the damaged heart tissue of adult mice, the heart cells started to regenerate when the UQCRFS1 was inhibited. The cells took up more and more glucose, similarly to fetal heart cells, and this increased glucose utilisation is capable of restoring cell division and growth in the adult heart, paving a new path for the treatment of damaged heart cells.
Supporters of this study are the National Institute of Health grants HL35440, HL122062, HL118491, HL109478. The research that was at Ann & Robert H Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago was carried out by the Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute. Lurie Children’s is a not-for-profit organisation that commits to giving an exceptional healthcare for every child and is part of the Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. It is also ranked top nationwide by the US News & World Report.
Dr Scumacker further elaborated and added, “This is a first step to being able to address one of the most important questions in cardiology: How do we get heart cells to remember how to divide again so that we can repair hearts?” Dr Schumacker and his collaboration team shall be focusing on the identification of drugs that could trigger the same mechanism of response in heart cells without the gene manipulation.
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