'Pumping Heart Patch' Ready For Human Use (bbc.com) 40
A "pumping" patch containing millions of living, beating stem cells could help repair the damage caused by a heart attack, according to researchers. Reader dryriver shares a report: Sewn on to the heart, the 3cm (1in) by 2cm patch, grown in a lab from a sample of the patient's own cells, then turns itself into healthy working muscle. It also releases chemicals that repair and regenerate existing heart cells. Tests in rabbits show it appears safe, Imperial College London experts told a leading heart conference in Manchester. Patient trials should start in the next two years, the British Cardiovascular Society meeting heard. A heart attack happens when a clogged artery blocks blood flow to the heart muscle, starving it of oxygen and nutrients. This can damage the heart's pumping power and lead to incurable heart failure. Heart failure affects about 920,000 people in the UK.
Bad News (Score:4, Funny)
It's made in Mexico with Chinese parts. Tariffs, and all.
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FDA Cleared or FDA Approved?
Looks like this was all done in the UK, with UK funding and intentions of testing it in the UK. So likely neither.
Were you by chance just watching Last Week Tonight: Medical Devices [youtube.com] with John Oliver?
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Something this new will not be FDA cleared. Nobody could claim this is completely equivalent to another approved product. It will not be FDA approved until after successful human trials.
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Refund accepted, you will be permitted to read something else for an additional two hours.
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This may help:
http://csufresno.readingprograms.org/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIho3ijJ7W4gIVENRkCh0B4gvHEAAYAyAAEgIK0PD_BwE
Problem is (Score:3)
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Re: Problem is (Score:3)
Of course the artery is unclogged first. This is a repair after saving the patient first. The heart will be weakened until it is repaired. This technique does the latter.
I would venture that this isnâ(TM)t done intravenously (like a stent or angioplasty) and would require open heart surgery to apply.
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Rabbits (Score:3)
How do studies in rabbits help anybody?
Signed: A Mouse.
Re:Rabbits (Score:5, Funny)
Nobody knows, they just hop for the best.
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Thank you.
I was pulling my hare out trying to think of a clever response.
The only patch they will see, for that matter (Score:2)
Sounds like something sedentary, overweight men who sit at the computer all day long, then again after they get home would find useful.
Wrong website!
Who TF writes these headlines? (Score:5, Insightful)
Headline: "'Pumping Heart Patch' Ready For Human Use"
From TFS:"Patient trials should start in the next two years" (emphasis mine).
How the hell is trials starting in the next two years equal to "ready for human use"???
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The humans in the trial... will be human.
When the clinical trials are about to start is exactly when it is first "ready for human use."
Nobody said it was "ready for use by the general public," or "ready for final government approval."
Another slow news day. (Score:3)
Nowadays, reporters and news aggregators often show up at major medical meetings looking for new stories to be reported in public or professional newspapers. Such reports are journalism, or "journalism", but they are not reviewed published scientific papers. Furthermore, many meeting presentations go unpublished, especially if there is some intent (or greed) to keep the product or process proprietary. This is a corruption of traditional scientific publishing in that such things are less for the public good and rather are part of a marketing campaign, to sell either the product or for the researchers careers.
Also, medical meetings these days, in which biotechnologies are strongly represented, typically have reports of many new technology products. There is often good science and engineering there, and it is an indicator of the general trends in technical development that are likely to affect medical care in the coming 5-10 years. But, each such paper or methodology is not a promise that it works or will succeed, be it technically, business wise, or clinically. For each such concept that comes through the lab and is presented at a meeting, few make it to the ranks of approved and marketed product.
The technology reported here is just another in this tradition of yet another medial meeting report sponsored by industry or the university, using the buzzwords or investor-favored technologies of the moment.
It is not novel. It is based on sound concepts of cell and tissue grafting that we use every day in surgery. The semi-novelty here is that it uses "stem cells" which for the past 5 years or so is shorthand for "I need grant money or seed money or something to impress you" and "stem cells" is the verbiage that gets you there. The concept of using immature blasts or pluripotent mesenchymal cells to fulfill our graft and regeneration needs is not new, and we have been doing so in surgery in one way or another for 40-50 years. It is just old concepts tweaked to some new delivery materials that want to apply regenerative cells to the myocardium. The concept is one of the quests of modern medicine, but their technique is mundane, derivative, and hardly revolutionary. Evolutionary yes, but that must be tempered with the knowledge that various approaches to myocardial cell restoration tried over the past 25 - 30 years have not succeeded to the point of clinical acceptance. It is not a trivial problem, and derivative ideas are not so likely to succeed any better.
Many of the comments here on Slashdot are not quite correct as to the physiology and pathology of this process. Myocardiocyte restoration is for the failing heart. Heart failure means that the heart is not an effective pump. Myocardial infarction (MI), a heart attack which kills myocardium by deprivation of blood flow, can result in heart failure, but not always, and there are many other causes of heart failure that do not involve loss of myocardial mass. For the sake of clinical development, sticking with a well defined model is important, so the post-MI heart is a streamlined way to look at it, so let's start there.
>> /. quote: "I guess they also need to make a bypass to it. Muscle is dead for a reason - there's not enough blood flow."
If the coronary arteries need to be revascularized, that needs to be done, as comments here have correctly stated, and the technique described here comes later. The dead part is dead and cannot be directly resurrected, but MI's heal. The normal healing and repair process includes generation of new capillaries, and it is a very robust and dynamic process. Vessel forming cells proliferate in response to demand, so if other cells are then applied, either natural repair cells (fibroblasts, scar) or therapeutic meant to differentiate to an end organ type, such as the cardiac smooth muscle cell, new vessels will follow automatically. Furthermore, if what is reported here are truly stem cells, then they should be able to readily differentiate into both angiocytes