Physicians at the Heart Hospital became the first team in the UK to treat a patient with an experimental new therapy designed to repair damage to cardiac muscle resulting from a heart attack. If successful, this treatment would give doctors the ability to improve the hearts of people with heart failure, rather than just treating the symptoms.
Known as autologous cell therapy, the technique under investigation involves injecting a patient's own muscle cells -- called myoblasts, which are different from stem cells -- into damaged regions of the heart during a coronary artery bypass operation. These cells are obtained several weeks in advance from the patient's leg during a biopsy and then cultured in a laboratory prior to injection into the heart muscle.
Nearly all patients who survive a significant heart attack progress to heart failure, which is a usually incurable condition that affects an estimated 22 million individuals worldwide and 4.4 million Europeans, including 900,000 in the UK.
"We are very excited to be part of this important clinical trial," said The Heart Hospital's William McKenna, Professor of Cardiology at University College London and the MAGIC Trial's principal investigator in the UK. "If we are able to reverse the damage done to cardiac muscle following a heart attack, or to safely halt a patient's further progression of heart failure, this would be a revolutionary advance in the treatment of heart disease."