New research may help repair damaged hearts
Ottawa-based team believes their method works better than available treatments
It took years for Emilio Alarcon and his University of Ottawa Heart Institute research team to fully believe what they were seeing — that a gel they had developed containing human collagen was repairing damaged hearts in mice.
They repeated their research study several times, coming up with randomized, blinded results, just to make sure the findings were correct.
“We had to complete it many times because we couldn’t believe it,” he said.
The results of that work, five years in the making, were published Friday in the prestigious journal Nature Communications. Alarcon and Erik Suuronen, a scientist in the division of cardiac surgery and director of its biomaterials and regeneration program, are lead authors.
The injectable material is the first in the world prepared using human collagen and is being called an unprecedented leap forward in addressing repair of cardiac muscle after a heart attack.
The work is still years away from clinical use on humans, but the findings are expected to attract attention because of the potential of the gel, which is designed to be injected into the hearts of patients with damaged heart tissue after a heart attack.
Alarcon said his team believes it performs better than any of the cell-based therapies or drug treatments currently available. The treatment works, he said, by increasing the number of cardiac muscle cells and blood capillaries in the tissue around damaged areas of the heart. The gel also helps bring more wound-healing cells to the site to promote repair.
Heart diseases are the leading cause of death around the world, and coronary artery disease, which can lead to a heart attack, is the most common.
About 10 per cent of people who have a heart attack (or myocardial infarction) will develop scarring and thickening of the heart wall that can lead to heart failure, which has a high mortality rate and is costly to treat.
Alarcon noted that patients in remote areas without easy access to health care and those who don’t seek immediate treatment or don’t know they had a heart attack are more likely to suffer heart muscle damage.
The treatment being developed by the heart institute team restored heart function in mice with scarred cardiac muscle.
The heart institute’s BioEngineering and Therapeutic Solutions team “are hopeful their human collagen gel will one day lead to a recovery of heart function and prevent heart failure in humans,” said Alarcon, “but more testing is required.”
The study published Friday is a first step toward that potential treatment, he said.
In Canada, about 600,000 patients live with advanced heart failure, and health-care costs amount to more than $2.8 billion every year. As people live longer, the number of patients and the cost of treatments are both likely to increase. epayne@postmedia.com