Teaching the heart to repair itself

BHF Centre of Regenerative Medicine funded by our Mending Broken Hearts Appeal

The £2.5m Oxford-led Centre for Mending Broken Hearts involves a strong partnership with fellow world-leading experts at the University of Cambridge, and also has links with the University of Bristol. The Oxbridge Centre will be headed by BHF Professor Paul Riley, a world-leading researcher in the area of heart regeneration. He made headlines in 2011 with his discovery that a non-beating type of cell from the outer layer of the heart could – if cajoled with the right molecules – become a beating heart muscle cell, called a cardiomyocyte. This finding proved that we might be able to 'remind' cells in the heart how to divide, grow and change to replace lost cells after a heart attack. After all, we all grow new heart cells in the embryo, right at the start of life – and some animals like the zebrafish never forget. At the Centre, researchers will look at how stem cells – which can divide and turn into other cells – form the heart at the start of life. This will give us clues about how we might rewind the clock. Other research programmes will look at the processes that occur in the heart shortly after a heart attack, such as the invasion of inflammatory cells to an area of damaged muscle, and the formation of inflexible scar tissue. The body's own response can make a heart attack much worse – but developing new treatments to tackle it could make a huge difference for patients.