Skin cells used to repair cardiac muscle in the lab

Laboratory researchers have successfully repaired damaged cardiac muscle using skin cells from a patient who had suffered heart failure.

The groundbreaking achievement means that a patients own cells could be used as a replenishment source in the heart, which eliminates the risk of the immune system rejecting the repaired organ. So far the method has only being trialled on rats and is subject to a lot more testing before human trials, but it still marks an important advance in the quest for replacement cells to treat tissue affected by disease.

Israeli researchers at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, used a method called human-induced pluripotent stem cells, or hiPSCs, which has been touted as a new and certainly less controversial research alternative to embryonic stem cells.

The process works by taking cells from a patient and introducing genes into the cell's nucleus. With the help of an added chemical, the genes then act as switches which re-programme the cells back to their versatile, youthful state. This is what eliminates the risk of an immune system reaction.

Lior Gepstein, a professor of cardiology at the Medical Center said: "What is new and exciting about our research is that we have shown that it's possible to take skin cells from an elderly patient with advanced heart failure and end up with his own beating cells in a laboratory dish that are healthy and young.

"The equivalent to the stage of his heart cells when he was just born."

The researchers are currently trying to work out in practical experiments whether heart cells derived from the same patient will be accepted by the immune system. Current tests on animals don’t really allow for them to do this efficiently, as they have to transplant human cells in animal models which are then treated with immunosuppressive drugs so the cells won't be rejected.