American scientists have made a new discovery about the human heart, proving that it has the ability to self-repair itself, in a scientific breakthrough that may save the lives of hundreds of thousands of patients around the world.
According to the study conducted by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, they have currently discovered the possibility of reactivating a gene that stops after birth to produce new working heart cells.
Previously, when a heart attack or heart failure occurred, the organ lost vital muscle cells without being able to replace them, and there was no effective way to regenerate damaged heart cells, forcing patients to rely on medications, medical devices, surgeries, or heart transplants.
During the study, the scientific team conducted an experiment on a group of donors aged 21, 41, and 55 years. The new technology relies on exploiting a natural gene called Cyclin A2 (CCNA2), which is essential for heart cell division and growth during embryonic development.
However, this gene is disabled shortly after birth, depriving adult heart cells of the ability to divide or repair themselves when damaged, but the scientific team used a harmless virus to transfer an active copy of the CCNA2 gene to heart muscle cells taken from donors.
The results in the two older samples showed human heart cells dividing, with normal behavior of the resulting cells resembling healthy heart cells. Additional analysis revealed that the CCNA2 gene helped heart cells “go back in time” by reactivating certain growth genes, enabling them to divide and repair the heart.
Dr. Hina Chowdhury, director of regenerative cardiovascular medicine at the hospital, said: “Heart disease is the leading cause of death globally, and while adult heart muscle cells stop dividing after birth, our research is the first to prove that a pig heart can be regenerated after injury.”
She continued, “We advanced the field by proving that middle-aged human heart cells – which were previously believed to be unable to divide – can be stimulated to produce new working cells, and this changes the therapeutic model from simply managing symptoms to actually repairing the human heart.”
She added that these results represent the culmination of efforts that lasted about two decades. “We pioneered the idea that the heart could be regenerated by reawakening dormant cell division genes, and now we have taken this vision one step closer to clinical application.”
She emphasized, “Our goal is to develop a treatment that enables the heart to heal itself after heart attacks or in cases of failure, which reduces the need for transplants or assistive devices.”