Heart cells are shown. Blue indicates nuclei. Credit: Yoshida Laboratory, CiRA, Kyoto University
Cell therapies for heart ailments involve transplanting over a billion heart cells to the patient’s heart. Many of these cells fail to engraft, however, compromising the benefits. One reason for the poor engraftment is that normally the heart cell population is a mixture of cells with different maturation. Researchers have now identified an ideal maturation stage that enhances engraftment and may reduce the number of cells required for therapy.
Under the direction of Sr Lecturer Yoshinori Yoshida, Dr Funakoshi took induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells that were reprogrammed from skin cells and made them into heart cells. Heart cells differentiated from iPS cells effectively go through all stages of development. “Heart cells at different stages could behave very differently,” said Fukakoshi. He therefore prepared heart cells of different maturation and transplanted them into damaged hearts of living mice. Hearts that received cells differentiated for 20 days showed much better engraftment than those that received cells differentiated for more or less, suggesting there exists an optimal maturation stage for cell therapies. However, Funakoshi cautions which day for human patients cannot be determined from this study. “We need to test animals bigger than mice,” he said.
Currently, over a billion cells are needed for human heart cell therapies. Knowing which cells are best for the therapy should not only improve patient outcome, but also reduce the number of cells required, which would further reduce both the time of the preparation and invasiveness of the procedure. https://www.cira.kyoto-u.ac.jp/e/pressrelease/news/160108-190000.html
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