Drug Discovery News
New progress presented at an annual conference of the American Heart Association signals renewed hope to repair the heart after injury.
When heart failure doesn’t kill immediately, it kills slowly. The heart is said to “remodel” after injury but often can’t come back stronger. Injured sections lose their vital nerves, or gain back too many. Fibroblast cells thicken the pump’s walls with collagen. The adult heart scars, and this weakens its output.
The problem is that adult hearts aren’t programmed to bounce back to their prior abilities. Yet “everything you need to regenerate a heart should exist in the mammalian genome,” said Ahmed Mahmoud, who studies regenerative biology at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute. “We know that early in life, the mammalian heart could actually do it by itself.” In 2011, Mahmoud and colleagues reported that mammals’ hearts can regenerate at very young ages: One-day-old mice recovered from having small slivers of their hearts cut out; seven-day-old mice didn’t.
Max G. Levy 