By: Jean Johnson for Heart1Anyone who’s heard the story of Billy the Kid knows that life on the frontier can be a free-for-all. Even though it’s not the Old Wild West, the field of regenerative medicine – using stem cells to repair the body instead of drugs and surgery – is clearly a frontier. Thus, stem cells can’t stay out of the news long, or for that matter, away from controversy. If it’s not the religious right versus the secular world debating the use of embryonic stem cells, it’s medical doctors involved in research taking on cardiologists in clinical practice.
The current brouhaha surrounds the question of whether stem cells from bone marrow injected into damaged areas of the heart can transform themselves into heart cells and restore function. On one hand, researchers are divided, some saying all systems are a go, and others saying the work has just begun. Clinicians, though – at least the select few undertaking trials in humans – answer the naysayers with a: Who cares what the science behind the procedure is. Patients facing death need help now and using stem cells from bone marrow helps them.
In 2001, a research team led by Donald Orlic, Ph.D. and staff scientist in the genetics and molecular biology branch of the Division of Intramural Research at the National Genome Research Institute, and Piero Anversa, M.D., director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute at New York Medical College, caused a major buzz by reporting that adult stem cells from mouse bone marrow had turned into heart cells after they were injected into a damaged mouse heart.
Since that time, clinicians around the world have undertaken 10 human trials. While most studies had produced only a 5 to 10 percent improvement in heart function, some cases have been dramatic like the Brazilian man who was initially too sick to walk, but who now jogs on the beach. Despite signs that something is at work, experts in the dark and researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington say that the Orlic-Anversa experiment simply does not result in stem cells from bone marrow morphing into heart cells. Stanford’s Irving Weissman M.D., a leading expert on stem cells, said, “these studies are premature and may in fact place a group of sick patients at risk.” Anversa counters that he has repeated the experiment successfully and that his critics suffer from “emotional disbelief.”
Clinicians around the globe, though, have run 10 trials on humans to date, and at least two more trials are ready to begin in the United States, one at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston and another at the Caritas St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Boston. In Boston, Douglas Losordo, M.D. spoke of his patients. “There are dramatic examples of patients going from being bed-bound to living normal lives.”
