The findings provide a hopeful alternative for current stem cell therapies that use donated bone marrow stem cells, but risk being rejection by the receiving heart patient.
Milica Radisic, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry at the University of Toronto, claims that giving patches from a patient’s own stem cells—regardless of the patient’s age—seem to eliminate any threat of rejection.
Avoiding the risk of rejection has been linked to utilizing cells from a heart patient’s own body, which Radisic and team discovered when they created a “micro-environment” that allows heart tissue to grow, with stem cells donated from elderly patients from the Toronto General Hospital.
The team tracked the molecular changes in the tissue patch cells and found that “certain aging factors turned off—effectively turning back the clock in the cells,” said Ren-Ke Li, Co-Researcher and Professor in the division of Cardiovascular Surgery at Toronto General Hospital, “…creating the conditions for a ‘fountain of youth’ reaction within a tissue culture.”
Clinical trials for this “life-giving patch” therapy have utilized the cells of elderly patients’ up until now, but Radisic acknowledges that aged cells don’t function as well as those derived from young patients.
Source: The Times of India
