Stem cell clues to fight heart disease

Thanks to your donations, we’re funding a research project of almost £190,000 at the University of East Anglia, which is making strides towards understanding how the heart develops.

The team of scientists led by Dr Andrea Mϋnsterberg is looking at how the heart develops very early in life.

They will improve our understanding of how the first few early heart cells grow and end up forming the heart, by looking in chicken embryos. These stem cells have the potential to become any type of heart cell.

Our heart develops when we are in the womb, when a complex system of signals, growth and movement of stem cells helps all of the organs in our body to form. Mistakes in this very delicate process can lead to heart defects at birth.

How your donations help

By gaining a better understanding of how heart development works, the discoveries made by this team may lead to new ways to prevent children from being born with congenital heart disease, or help prevent the development of coronary heart disease in later life.

Gaining an understanding of heart development also gives hope to patients with heart failure, the focus of our Mending Broken Hearts Appeal. When a person suffers a heart attack, they lose areas of heart muscle which can’t be replaced, often leading to debilitating symptoms. We lose the ability to produce new heart muscle cells in large amounts around the time of birth, but research like this project at the University of East Anglia may give us new clues about how to ‘switch on’ the potential of our heart cells to divide.