Kickstarting the body’s repair mechanisms after a heart attack

Mesenchymal stromal cell apoptosis is required to resolve inflammation and promote tissue repair after myocardial infarction

When someone suffers a heart attack, some of their heart cells die and the body is unable to replace them. This can eventually lead to heart failure. Scientists have been testing whether injecting a type of stem cell - known as mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) – into the heart could help to limit damage and prevent heart failure. Although this treatment has shown some success, it is not fully understood how MSCs have a protective effect. Professor Dazzi and his team at King’s College London have been studying MSCs in transplant medicine. They found that the body’s immune cells can cause MSCs to program themselves to die. Although it sounds counter-intuitive, they believe this cell death is essential for the protective effects of MSCs. Now, the researchers want to see if this also underlies the way these cells can promote repair of the heart after injury. The researchers will test this theory by studying how MSC death is affected by the inflammatory response caused by a heart attack. They will also inject these cells into the hearts of mice following a heart attack, to see if they can link the level of MSC death to inflammatory responses and heart damage. If successful, this project could help to show whether this approach is possible in people who’ve had a heart attack, and could pave the way for developing a method for using MSCs to help prevent heart failure.