Science’s new beat: the lab-grown patch that can heal broken hearts

An experimental new treatment may have been discovered that could - believe it or not - mend a broken heart.

Back in 2021, a 46-year-old woman with severe heart failure was given a lab-made patch made up of 800 million cells derived from a donor’s umbilical cord which scientists are calling “the first [method] to demonstrate reparation of the heart.”

Just three months after being patched up with the ‘band-aid’, the woman underwent a heart transplant and scientists moved to examine her re-sealed organ that was discarded.

Results of experimental treatment shock scientists

The results of the experimental analysis, published on Wednesday, were shocking: her heart had indeed regenerated thanks to the patch.

Around fifteen people have already received one of the patches since March 2021. One of them, Frank Teege, told Spanish newspaper El País that “I was getting weaker and weaker and couldn’t walk 50 meters without running out of breath. In fact, I had a cardiac output of just 10%. After the patch operation, my cardiac output has improved significantly. It is now 35%.”

The astonishing research paper says that the treatment’s impact comes “without intolerable side effects, such as arrhythmia and tumour growth." Conclusions from studies carried out on macaques highlighted “pivotal underpinnings for the approval of a first-in-human clinical trial on tissue-engineered heart repair.”

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“In the future it will be another tool against different degenerative diseases“, Ignacio Rodríguez Polo, a scientist who participated in the investigation, told El País. “There are also advances in the regeneration of the substantia nigra, which is one of the parts of the brain most affected in Parkinson’s disease, or against a degeneration of the eye. With the number of clinical trials with promising data that there are now, I sincerely believe that it will happen in the short to medium term. It’s becoming more and more tangible.”

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