Heart failure: An incurable condition.
Heart failure is when a person’s heart is unable to pump blood around their body efficiently. At least 64 million people worldwide and an estimated 920,000 in the UK are living with the condition.
The most common causes of heart failure are heart attack, high blood pressure and diseases of the heart muscle called cardiomyopathies.
We have treatments, not cures.
No cure exists for people living with heart failure. Available treatments can only control the effects and improve quality of life. If these cannot help, a person may be considered for heart transplant surgery.
Due to the shortage of donor hearts, and because the outlook of survival is poor for very unwell patients, fewer than 200 heart transplants are carried out in the UK each year.
The long-term success rate of heart transplants is also affected by organ rejection. This is when the body’s immune system recognises the new heart as a foreign object and attacks it.
Regenerative medicine: ‘The Holy Grail of research.
In 2013, we established the BHF Centres of Regenerative Medicine. Each Centre had a different scientific focus.
Professor Sian Harding and colleagues at Imperial College London were working to generate new heart muscle, or heart tissue from stem cells, to repair damaged hearts.
Researchers led by BHF Professor Andrew Baker at the University of Edinburgh were exploring ways to replace or repair damaged blood vessels.
At the University of Oxford, BHF Professor Paul Riley and his team were striving to teach the heart how to repair itself.
What has been achieved so far.
The Centres have made significant advances towards benefit for patients. For instance, Professor Sian Harding and her team at Imperial developed a thumb-size stem cell patch.
Containing up to 50 million human stem cells these patches are programmed to turn into working heart muscle. They can even ‘beat’. The patch can stick to a damaged heart, helping it pump more efficiently whilst stimulating heart cell repair and regeneration. The team are now close to trials in humans.
What’s next?
We will now be building on the most promising lines of work that have emerged from the Centres over the last eight years. This time, the Centres will be led from the Universities of Edinburgh, Nottingham, and Oxford.
Together, the Centres will target restoration of lost heart muscle, the healing of injured blood vessels and the growth of new lymphatic blood vessels, which are essential for repair after a heart attack.
The research aims to support two goals:
- Healing hearts by repairing or creating new heart muscle.
- Growing new lymphatic and blood vessels in the heart.