By Dale Quinn
ARIZONA DAILY STAR 8/4/09
Researchers at Tucson’s veterans hospital are developing a patch that could one day act as a living bandage helping to heal people’s damaged heart muscles.
Dr. Steven Goldman, chief of cardiology for the Southern Arizona VA Health Care System, is leading the research.
“We’ve been doing work with heart failure for years; we have a specific interest in developing new treatments,”Goldman said. The patch — which is the intellectual property of San Francisco-based Theregen Inc., a regenerative-medicine company — is a biodegradable mesh structure covered in living fibroblast cells. Those cells secrete hormonelike growth factors that stimulate other cells to grow, Goldman said.
Researchers put the patch on rats with heart failure to see if it could improve the organ’s functions and discovered it works reasonably well right after a heart attack, Goldman said.
“What we’re trying to do now is make it work better in rats with chronic heart failure,” said Goldman, who also is associated with the University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center.
The funding comes primarily from an annual grant of $135,000 from the VA Merit Review Program of Washington, D.C., Goldman said.
The benefit of this new step in cardiology is important to veterans as well as to the public at large, VA spokesman Pepe Mendoza said.
“It’s cutting-edge research that could extend the lives of your loved ones,” he said.
Jordan Lancaster, a pre-doctoral fellow who works in Goldman’s lab, said they are now working on getting the patch to repopulate the left ventricular wall with new heart cells after an injury. The left ventricle pumps oxygenated blood throughout the body.
The patches are seeded with cardiomyocytes, or heart muscle cells, and then implanted onto the heart. The idea is to get the muscle cells to start communicating with native tissues in a way that allows for rhythmic, synchronized contractions, Lancaster said.
“The main focus is to get new heart muscle cells into the heart because of its lack of ability to repair itself,” Lancaster said. With chronic heart failure, which usually occurs after a heart attack, those cells can become like scar tissue, so the idea is to regenerate them, the researchers said.
Still, it’s difficult to say when people might benefit from the living, beating bandage, Goldman said.
The patch itself, without the cardiomyocytes, is in Phase 1 of clinical patient trials, Goldman said. Those trials are in patients with coronary artery bypass grafting and patients in endstage heart failure who have a left ventricular assist device.
The seeded patches — with the heart muscle cells added — aren’t in the clinical trial phase yet. So far, Goldman said he and his research team are working to see if thepatchwillworkonalive rat. For human use, the patch would require embryonic or human cardiac stem cells, he said.
Goldman said the research has been a community effort with students from the University of Arizona and high schoolers from the BASIS Tucson charter school.
Contact reporter Dale Quinn at 573-4197 or dquinn@azstarnet.com.
Theregen’s Anginera Patch Used as Foundation for Beating Heart Cell Patch
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Theregen, Inc. (www.theregen.com) has announced that its Anginera™ heart patch, a living three-dimensional engineered human tissue, was used as the foundation for the ”living band-aid for the heart” reported recently at the 2009 American Heart Association (www.americanheart.org) Cardiovascular Sciences Conference in Las Vegas, NV.
Views of the beating heart tissue are available courtesy of NPR ScienceFriday at http://www.theregen.com/heartbeat_popup.html.
Anginera, an epicardial patch containing living human fibroblast cells and extracellular matrix, induces arteriogenesis, repair and restoration of regional heart function. The heart cells embedded in the Anginera tissue scaffold were derived from rat heart tissue. Researchers Steven Goldman, M.D. and Jordan Lancaster, B.S., from the Southern Arizona Veterans Administration and the University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center, reported that the Anginera patch cultured with rat heart cells can beat in coordinated rhythm at various rates (www.sciencefriday.com/videos/watch/10230/).
Anginera is currently in human clinical testing for cardiac applications. The patch has demonstrated an ability to 1.) stimulate new mature blood vessels (arteriogenesis) in the human heart in trial patients and 2.) improve left ventricular function in animal models.
Theregen, Inc. (www.theregen.com) develops cell-based therapies for patients with cardiac disease. Theregen's primary corporate objective is the clinical development and approval of Anginera™, its lead product candidate. Theregen is located in San Francisco, Calif.
Contacts
Theregen, Inc.
David Ringler, 925-935-5710
Corporate Communications
dringler@theregen.com
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