Heart failure is a common, disabling and expensive disorder, as well as being the number one killer in the US, above even cancer. It’s great news then that promising results from the first trial in humans, to use the heart’s own stem cells to heal damage caused by heart disease, are released this week in The Lancet.

The adult heart contains cardiac stem cells (CSCs) that are self-renewing, clonogenic (able to produce identical daughter cells), and multipotent (ie. they differentiate into all three major cardiac lineages – myocytes, vascular smooth muscle cells and endothelial cells). In animal models, CSCs have helped heal heart failure, but these cells had not been tried in humans.

The article is timed to coincide with a presentation at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions meeting, Orlando, FL, USA. and its authors (Professor Roberto Bolli, University of Louisville, KY, USA and Professor Piero Anversa, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.) state that :

“Our study is the first report of the administration of CSCs in people. The results are a significant addition to the current data because they introduce a new potential treatment for heart failure… The present results provide a strong rationale for further studies of CSC treatment in patients with severe heart failure secondary to ischaemic cardiomyopathy, who have a poor prognosis.”

The authors and their research colleagues did a phase 1 clinical trial of CSCs in patients with heart failure after a heart attack to assess the safety and feasibility of intracoronary CSC infusion, and to test the hypothesis that this intervention would improve the contractile function of the heart and the general clinical status of the patient.

The most common cause of heart failure in the developed world is ischemic heart disease in which the heart blood vessels of the heart become blocked, causing death of heart muscle tissue. This leads to the heart being able to pump less blood, resulting in a decrease in left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF). Current treatments do not address the fundamental problem of the loss of cardiac tissue, leaving patients’ hearts and corresponding fitness levels permanently weakened.

The authors report the results in 23 patients with severe heart failure (LVEF