Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, responsible for 18 million deaths a year. One out of five of all deaths in the United States are from cardiovascular diseases (CVDs).

Ischaemic heart disease, better known as coronary artery disease (CAD), is the most common type of heart disease. CADs occur when there is build up or damage to the heart’s major blood vessels, limiting blood flow. 

Coronary artery disease was responsible for over 375,000 deaths within the United States in 2021, 20% of which were in adults under 65 years old. It’s often not accompanied by any symptoms.

CVDs have sat atop the list of leading causes of death for over 20 years, with the development of meaningful treatments providing a huge challenge for medical researchers.

However, scientists at Duke-NUS Medical School have recently made significant strides in developing a new stem cell therapy to address potential heart failure.

This unique new treatment grows pluripotent (or immature) stem cells into heart muscle precursor cells. Through cell differentiation, these cells can gain specialized functions and during preclinical trials they were able to restore damaged tissue and improve heart function after being injected into the damaged area.

According to Dr. Lynn Yap…

“As early as four weeks after the injection, there was rapid engraftment, which means the body is accepting the transplanted stem cells. We also observed the growth of new heart tissue and an increase in functional development, suggesting that our protocol has the potential to be developed into an effective and safe means for cell therapy.”

The use of pluripotent cells has already shown significant benefits over transplanting mature heart cells.

The use of immature stem cells addresses a few of the key limitations of previous stem cell treatments for CVDs. Most notably the poor engraftment of the new cells and inconsistent differentiation.

These older methods have led to serious side effects, which are often fatal. Most notably ventricular arrhythmia, which can limit (or even stop) blood flow from the heart. Pluripotent cells are able to expand and acquire the natural rhythm of the heart.

This revolutionary new treatment did not trigger the formation of tumors, which is a common concern with stem cell therapies.

At The Heart Of It

The key to why this therapy is safer and more effective than previous attempts to treat CVDs with stem cell therapy is the use of laminins.

Laminins are proteins that are key in how cells interact with their surroundings and direct the development of different tissue cell types.

This laminin-based protocol has shown increased efficacy and safety during trials on large animals. Enrico Petretto, co-author of the study said…

“To ensure patient safety, it is imperative that cell-based therapies show consistent efficacy and reproducible results. By extensive molecular and gene expression analyses, we demonstrated that our laminin-based protocol for generating functional cells to treat heart disease is highly reproducible”

Duke-NUS’s new therapy method has been licensed for use to the Swedish biotech startup Alder Therapeutics, who will further develop it for use in humans. 

The same technology is being used by Alder to treat degenerative vision loss using retina-specific laminins.

While there is still significant testing yet to be done, these are promising advancements in a field that has struggled to develop new therapies. A safe and effective type of new treatment could mean saving millions of lives.

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