Category Archives: Stem Cell Therapy

The California Stem Cell Report has found its cyberspace connection again on Isla Taboga about 10 miles offshore of Panama City. We expect to bring you live coverage via an Internet audiocast of Wednesday's meeting of the board of the California stem cell agency. The directors are scheduled to discuss a progress report on the agency's ambitious, $250 million disease team program and the termination of one grant. Directors are also expected to consider the agency's proposed budget for the coming year, its plans for its next few years of life and its plans to give away $3 million for stem cell programs for high school students. The meeting begins at 9 a.m. PDT.

http://www.cirm.ca.gov/summaries-review-applications-rfa-11-04-cirm-creativity-awards

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HOUSTON -

Doctors from the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital have found that patients with heart failure may be able to repair the damaged areas of the heart with stem cells from the patient's own bone marrow.

Doctors presented the findings at the American College of Cardiologys 61st Annual Scientific Session Saturday.

The results are from a multi-center clinical study that measured the possible benefits of using a patients own bone marrow cells to repair damaged areas of the heart suffering from severe heart failure, a condition that affects millions of Americans.

The study, which was the largest such investigation to date, found that the hearts of the patients receiving bone marrow derived stem cells showed a small but significant increase in the ability to pump oxygenated blood from the left ventricle, the hearts main pumping chamber, to the body.

The expectation is that the study will pave the way for potential new treatment options and will be important to designing and evaluating future clinical trials.

This is exactly the kind of information we need to move forward with the clinical use of stem cell therapy, said Emerson Perin, MD, PhD, Director of Clinical Research for Cardiovascular Medicine at THI, and one of the studys lead investigators.

The bone-marrow derived stem cells are helpful to the injured heart when they are themselves biologically active, added Dr. James T. Willerson, the studys principal investigator and President and Medical Director of THI.

This study moves us one step closer to being able to help patients with severe heart failure who have no other alternatives.

The study was conducted by the Cardiovascular Cell Therapy Research Network, the national consortium to conduct such research funded by the National Institutes of Healths National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

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Stem cell, heart heath study

Johannesburg, Mar 25 : Stem cells could repair damage in people with advanced heart disease, a new study has claimed.

According to researchers at a major US cardiology conference, patients with advanced heart disease who received an experimental stem cell therapy showed slightly improved heart function.

The clinical trial involved 92 patients, with an average age of 63, who were picked at random to get either a placebo or a series of injections of their own stem cells, taken from their bone marrow, into damaged areas of their hearts.

The patients all had chronic heart disease, along with either heart failure or angina, and their left ventricles were pumping at less than 45 percent of capacity.

All the participants in the study were ineligible for revascularisation surgery, such as coronary bypass to restore blood flow, because their heart disease was so advanced.

Those who received the stem cell therapy saw a small but significant boost in the heart's ability to pump blood, measuring the increase from the heart's main pumping chamber at 2.7 percent more than placebo patients.

Study authors described the trial as the largest to date to examine stem cell therapy as a route to repairing the heart in patients with chronic ischemic heart disease and left ventricular dysfunction.

"This is the kind of information we need in order to move forward with the clinical use of stem cell therapy," News24 quoted Emerson Perin, the lead investigator from Texas Heart Institute as saying.

Perin's research, which was conducted between 2009 and 2011 across five US sites, was presented at the annual American College of Cardiology Conference in Chicago.

Original post:
Stem cell therapy `may repair heart damage`

Published on Mar 25, 2012

CHICAGO (AFP) - Patients with advanced heart disease who received an experimental stem cell therapy showed slight improvements in blood pumping but no change in most of their symptoms, United States researchers said on Saturday.

Study authors described the trial as the largest to date to examine stem cell therapy as a route to repairing the heart in patients with chronic ischemic heart disease and left ventricular dysfunction.

Previous studies have established that the approach is safe in human patients, but none had examined how well it worked on a variety of heart ailments.

The clinical trial involved 92 patients, with an average age of 63, who were picked at random to get either a placebo or a series of injections of their own stem cells, taken from their bone marrow, into damaged areas of their hearts.

Continued here:
Stem cell therapy could repair some heart damage: Study

Public release date: 24-Mar-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Kristin Wincek kwincek@mhif.org 612-863-0249 Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation

CHICAGO Cell therapy may present an option for patients with ischemic heart disease to use their own bone marrow cells to repair the damaged areas of their hearts, and may pave the way for future treatment options, according to the FOCUS trial, which will be presented as a late-breaking clinical trial March 24 at the 61st annual American College of Cardiology (ACC) scientific session.

This is the largest study to date to look at stem cell therapy, using a patient's own stem cells, to repair damaged areas of the heart in patients with chronic ischemic heart disease and left ventricular dysfunction. Researchers found that left ventricular ejection fraction (the percentage of blood leaving the heart's main pumping chamber) increased by a small but significant amount (2.7 percent) in patients who received stem cell therapy. The study also revealed that the improvement in ejection fraction correlated with the number of progenitor cells (CD34+ and CD133+) in the bone marrow; and this information will help in evaluating and designing future therapies and trials.

"FOCUS is an incredibly important trial, as it has informed the cell therapy community how to better treat this high-risk patient population, and allows us to enter into an exciting, next generation of stem cell therapy armed with more data," said study investigator Timothy D. Henry, MD, an interventional cardiologist at the Minneapolis Heart Institute (MHI) at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis and director of research with the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation.

This multicenter study was conducted by the Cardiovascular Cell Therapy Research Network (CCTRN), which is supported through a research grant from the National Institutes of Health's National, Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), with the goal to evaluate novel stem cell-based treatment strategies for individuals with cardiovascular disease.

FOCUS will be presented at ACC.12 by its lead investigator Emerson C. Perin, MD, PhD, director of clinical research for cardiovascular medicine at the Texas Heart Institute, one of the five sites in the CCTRN. The Minneapolis Heart Institute is another site of the five in the network, and a large number of CCTRN patients were enrolled in Minnesota.

For this study, which took place between April 2009 and April 2011, the five sites randomly selected 92 patients to receive stem cell treatment or placebo. The symptomatic patients, with an average age 63, all had chronic ischemic heart disease and an ejection fraction of less than 45 percent (baseline 34 percent) along with heart failure and/or angina and were no longer candidates for revascularization. "These patients had no other options, as medical management failed to improve their symptoms," explained the study's co-investigator Jay Traverse, MD, an interventionalist cardiologist at the Minneapolis Heart Institute at Abbott Northwestern Hospital and physician researcher with the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation.

Bone marrow was aspirated from the patients and processed to obtain just the mononuclear fraction of the marrow. In patients randomly selected to receive stem cell therapy, physicians inserted a catheter into the heart's left ventricle to inject 100 million stem cells in more than 15 sites that showed damage on the electromechanical mapping image of the heart.

"Studies such as these are able to be completed much faster because of the team approach of the network" said Sonia I. Skarlatos, PhD, NHBLI's deputy director of the division of cardiovascular sciences and program director of CCTRN.

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Cell therapy using patient's own bone marrow may present option for heart disease

SATURDAY, March 24 (HealthDay News) -- An innovative approach using patients' own bone marrow cells to treat chronic heart failure came up short in terms of effectiveness, researchers report.

Use of stem cell therapy to repair the slow, steady damage done to heart muscle and improve heart function is safe, but has not been shown to improve most measures of heart function, the study authors said.

"For the measures we paid most attention to, we saw no effect, there is no question about that," said researcher Dr. Lemuel Moye, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston.

"Ultimately, this is going to pay off handsomely for individuals and for public health in general, but it's going to take years of work," Moye said. "We are the vanguard looking for new promising lines of research."

While the hoped-for results didn't materialize, there appeared to be a small improvement in some patients, he said. "When we looked at another commonly used measure of heart function called ejection fraction, or the strength of the heart's pumping, that's where all the action was," Moye noted.

It's hard to know which measures of heart function to look at, Moye explained. "We have had some difficulty with that," he said.

Future research will look at other measures of heart function, pay more attention to the characteristics of the cells that are injected and determine which cells are best, he added.

Cardiac cells and other types of specially prepared cells are available now that were not accessible when this study started in 2009, Moye pointed out.

The results of the trial, which was sponsored by the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, were to be presented Saturday at the American College of Cardiology's annual meeting in Chicago. The report was also published online March 24 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

For the study, Moye and colleagues worked with 92 patients, average age 63 and mostly male, who had heart failure with and without chest pain. They were randomly assigned to receive either an injection of 100 million bone marrow cells from their own bone marrow, or an inactive placebo. Patients in both groups also received aggressive medical therapy.

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Stem-Cell Trial Failed to Treat Heart Failure