Gene Therapy Shows Early Promise for Heart Failure

By Amy Norton

HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, Feb. 21 (HealthDay News) -- When it comes to treating heart failure, the ultimate hope is to develop a therapy that repairs the damaged heart muscle.

Now, an early study hints at a way to do that by harnessing the body's natural capacity for repair.

Heart failure is a chronic, progressive condition where the heart cannot pump blood efficiently enough to meet the body's needs, which leads to problems like fatigue, breathlessness and swelling in the legs and feet. Most often, it arises after a heart attack leaves heart muscle damaged and scarred.

In the new study, researchers were able to use gene therapy to modestly improve symptoms in 17 patients with stage III heart failure -- where the disease is advanced enough that even routine daily tasks become difficult.

What is novel about the tactic, the researchers said, is that the gene therapy is designed to attract the body's own stem cells to the part of the heart muscle that's damaged. The hope is that the stem cells will then get some repair work done.

The findings, published Feb. 21 in the journal Circulation Research, are preliminary, and much more research needs to be done.

"This is a proof-of-concept study," explained lead researcher Dr. Marc Penn, a professor at Northeast Ohio Medical University in Rootstown, and director of research at Summa Cardiovascular Institute in Akron. But Penn and other heart failure experts said they were cautiously optimistic about the therapy's potential for at least some patients.

Stem cells are primitive cells that can develop into different types of body tissue. Adults have the cells in their bone marrow, and they give rise to blood cells. Researchers have also found that individual organs in the body, including the heart, have their own pools of stem cells.

Those stem cells may try to repair damaged tissue, but they are not all that successful, Penn said. So his team sought to give the stem cells a helping hand. They infused patients' heart muscle with three different doses of a drug that carried a gene for SDF-1, a natural protein in the body believed to recruit stem cells to sites of tissue damage.

Lab research has suggested that after a heart attack, SDF-1 activity in the heart goes up -- but only for a short time, Penn said. The goal of the experimental therapy is to enhance SDF-1 and draw more stem cells to where they are needed.

The initial results are promising, Penn said. The approach seemed safe, with no major side effects linked to the treatment. Two of the study patients died within a year, but the deaths were deemed not to be connected to the treatment.

Among the 15 patients who were alive one year later, there were improvements in their symptoms and walking ability.

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