Updated To Add Comments from the studies lead author, Dr. Emerson Perin of the Texas Heart Institute, and broll of news conference.
Journalists: See bottom of this post for audio and video resources.
A research network led by a Mayo Clinic physician found that stem cells derived from heart failure patients’ own bone marrow and injected into their hearts improved the function of the left ventricle, the heart’s pumping chamber. Researchers also found that certain types of the stem cells were associated with the largest improvement and warrant further study.
The results were presented today at the 2012 American College of Cardiology Meeting in Chicago. They will also be published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
This Phase II clinical trial, designed to test this strategy to improve cardiac function, is an extension of earlier efforts in Brazil in which a smaller number of patients received fewer stem cells. For this new network study, 92 patients received a placebo or 100 million stem cells derived from the bone marrow in their hips in a one-time injection. This was the first study in humans to deliver that many bone marrow stem cells.
“We found that the bone marrow cells did not have a significant impact on the original end points that we chose, which involved reversibility of a lack of blood supply to the heart, the volume of the left ventricle of the heart at the end of a contraction, and maximal oxygen consumption derived through a treadmill test,” says Robert Simari, M.D., a cardiologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. He is chairman of the Cardiovascular Cell Therapy Research Network (CCTRN), the network of five academic centers and associated satellite sites that conducted the study. The CCTRN is supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, which also funded the study.
Click here to view the news release.
Journalists: The following soundbites from Dr. Simari and Dr. Perin, as well as broll from the ACC news conference are available for download and use in your stories.
ACC News Conference Broll: MOV
Dr. Simari:
Dr. Perin:
Below in an edited youtube video of Dr. Simari that you can embed with your stories.
