CIRM Spotlight on Heart Failure: A stem cell trial shows promise for healing injured hearts

Todd Dubnicoff is CIRM’s videographer and video editor

At many CIRM governing board meeting, we set time aside to hear from researchers, clinicians, and patients about the hope of stem cell research in a particular disease area. We film each of these Spotlight on Disease seminars so that the scientists’ progress and the patients’ stories are available to the public (a video archive of past Spotlights is here). At the December 8th Spotlight, the board heard about the hope for a stem cell based heart failure treatment that is showing promising results here and now in a clinical trial for patients (watch that video here).

“An easy painless miracle.” That’s the way Fred Lesikar, one of the Spotlight speakers and a clinical trial participant, described the procedure that used his own heart stem cells to regenerate his scarred heart tissue injured by a massive attack two years ago at the age of 59.

The procedure is straight-forward: clinicians obtain a small tissue sample from the patient’s heart during a 15 minute procedure under local anesthetic. Under specific laboratory conditions, stem cells spontaneously grow out of this tissue sample. These cells are then harvested and delivered back into the patient’s coronary artery. Lesikar told the board that he is thrilled with the results:

I was in pretty bad shape…Next week it will be two years since I had the stem cells put in…it wasn’t like a light switch going off but by the time I got to a year I was feeling great…Now I’m flying down to Costa Rica tomorrow, the day after tomorrow I’ll be tromping through the jungle and my only concern is that the people with me aren’t going to be able to keep up.

Eduardo Marban, MD, PhD, director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, led this first-in-human clinical trial and was the main speaker at this month’s Spotlight. Marban summarized the hallmarks of heart failure after a heart attack and described the results of the trial:

One quarter of heart attack patients end up with so much scar that life expectancy is compromised…Once the scar occurs it’s irreversible…At one year, the subjects receiving the stem cell therapy have 12 to 13 grams less scar than they did at the beginning of the study. That in of itself is a good thing but what really got us excited was the fact that when we looked at the living heart muscle, those subjects have 22 grams of new living heart muscle…That's equivalent to restoring about half or more than half of the lost heart muscle in these subjects (compared to no change in control subjects).

Marban also showed results of pre-clinical studies funded by a CIRM Disease Team grant, which uses an alternate preparation and delivery method of the heart stem cells. These studies will form the basis of an FDA application in the second quarter of 2012 to perform a follow-on clinical trial.

T.D.