Developing a new regenerative therapy to repair heart attack damage

Development of reparative macrophage transplantation for the treatment of myocardial infarction through refinement of current bone marrow mononuclear cell therapy

Heart attacks cause damage to the heart muscle, which can limit its ability to pump blood around the body effectively. There are currently no treatments available to repair the damage caused by a heart attack. However, researchers in the field of regenerative medicine – which aims to uncover ways to repair and replace damaged areas of the body - hope that this could be achieved using stem cells taken from our bone marrow. Previous work has suggested that bone marrow cells injected into the heart after damage release factors which can help to stimulate repair processes and improve heart function – but the beneficial effects were not large, suggesting that this technique needs further development. Professor Suzuki his team at Queen Mary, University of London believe that a particular type of cell from the bone marrow – known as ‘tissue-repairing macrophages’ -could be better at releasing repair-stimulating factors. In this project, they will test if mouse tissue-repairing macrophages, or factors they release, can be feasibly injected into injured mouse hearts, and whether they are able to stimulate repair processes. They also hope to test whether the procedure they have developed to generate these cells also works for human bone marrow. If successful, this study could take us a step closer to the next generation of treatments to help stop heart attack leading to heart failure.