The study, reported by Israel21c, raises hopes that the method will eventually serve to enable natural biological pacemakers.
Heart disease is a leading cause of death worldwide. Heart attacks cause tissue to be permanently destroyed when blood is temporarily cut off to sections of the heart.
The implications of the Israeli study could eventually result in relief for the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who now use artificial pacemakers to regulate their hearts. Pacemakers are typically inserted because the normal rhythm-generating cells work irregularly, or because they have a break in the cell system of the heart used to spread the natural pacemaking nerve signal.
The Israeli experiment used human embryonic stem cells, taken from five-day-old embryos, which have the ability to grow into almost all of the hundreds of kinds of cells in the body. Researchers are currently focused on discovering methods of integrating stem-cells to regenerate various organs.
The research team from Israel’s Technion Institute of Science, which was headed by Prof. Lior Gepstein of the Bruce and Ruth Rappaport Institute of Medical Sciences at the Technion Faculty of Medicine, and including leading stem cell researcher Prof. Joseph Itskovitz-Eldor of Rambam Medical Center's obstetrics and gynecology department, showed that the cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells) created from tiny human embryos integrated functionally into the pigs' hearts.
"This has been a long process," Gepstein told Israel21c. "Our first step was generating cell types from stem cells in the lab. We then succeeded in generating heart cells a few years ago. The next step was not only to generate but to show that these cells could function in vivo, and integrate with other networks of cells, and we have now done that."
"This is extremely important research," David Gutterman, associate director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee said. "This could lead to a replacement of the mechanical pacemaker, which requires surgery to replace the battery every few years. We could also replace beating cells in patients who have had heart attacks."
Technion scientists are widely recognized as pioneers in stem cell research. Itskovitz-Eldor was among the team that first discovered in 1998 the potential of stem cells to form any kind of tissue.
Gepstein's team started with masses of stem cells growing in laboratory dishes, from which they isolated those few that were spontaneously developing into heart cells. Pulsing in unison, as heart cells do, they were easy to spot.
The team threaded a probe into the hearts of the 13 pigs and made a small burn in the area that regulates heartbeat, causing a permanent severe slowing of those animals' heart rates. The injury mimicked a human heart rhythm disorder that could be caused by disease or a small heart attack.
Then they injected about 100,000 of their human embryo-derived heart cells into the pig hearts. Eleven of the 13 returned to faster heart rates, the team reported in the Nature Biotechnology journal.
Heart disease is a leading cause of death worldwide. Heart attacks cause tissue to be permanently destroyed when blood is temporarily cut off to sections of the heart.
The implications of the Israeli study could eventually result in relief for the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who now use artificial pacemakers to regulate their hearts. Pacemakers are typically inserted because the normal rhythm-generating cells work irregularly, or because they have a break in the cell system of the heart used to spread the natural pacemaking nerve signal.
The Israeli experiment used human embryonic stem cells, taken from five-day-old embryos, which have the ability to grow into almost all of the hundreds of kinds of cells in the body. Researchers are currently focused on discovering methods of integrating stem-cells to regenerate various organs.
The research team from Israel’s Technion Institute of Science, which was headed by Prof. Lior Gepstein of the Bruce and Ruth Rappaport Institute of Medical Sciences at the Technion Faculty of Medicine, and including leading stem cell researcher Prof. Joseph Itskovitz-Eldor of Rambam Medical Center's obstetrics and gynecology department, showed that the cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells) created from tiny human embryos integrated functionally into the pigs' hearts.
"This has been a long process," Gepstein told Israel21c. "Our first step was generating cell types from stem cells in the lab. We then succeeded in generating heart cells a few years ago. The next step was not only to generate but to show that these cells could function in vivo, and integrate with other networks of cells, and we have now done that."
"This is extremely important research," David Gutterman, associate director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee said. "This could lead to a replacement of the mechanical pacemaker, which requires surgery to replace the battery every few years. We could also replace beating cells in patients who have had heart attacks."
Technion scientists are widely recognized as pioneers in stem cell research. Itskovitz-Eldor was among the team that first discovered in 1998 the potential of stem cells to form any kind of tissue.
Gepstein's team started with masses of stem cells growing in laboratory dishes, from which they isolated those few that were spontaneously developing into heart cells. Pulsing in unison, as heart cells do, they were easy to spot.
The team threaded a probe into the hearts of the 13 pigs and made a small burn in the area that regulates heartbeat, causing a permanent severe slowing of those animals' heart rates. The injury mimicked a human heart rhythm disorder that could be caused by disease or a small heart attack.
Then they injected about 100,000 of their human embryo-derived heart cells into the pig hearts. Eleven of the 13 returned to faster heart rates, the team reported in the Nature Biotechnology journal.