Fat Cells for Broken Hearts

[TECH NEWS]

A company is testing whether stem cells from fat could help prevent long-term damage after a heart attack. Too much fat around the waist may be bad for your health, but the stem cells it contains might one day save your life. Starting this month, a new European trial aims to determine whether stem cells harvested from a person’s own fat, delivered shortly after a heart attack, could prevent some of the cardiac muscle damage that results from blocked arteries. During a heart attack, blood vessels that deliver blood to the heart muscle are blocked, and the lack of oxygen slowly kills the tissue. San Diego-based Cytori Therapeutics has developed a treatment that aims to prevent much of that muscle damage before it starts. It works by injecting a concentrated slurry of stem cells and other regenerative cells isolated from the patient’s body directly into the heart’s main artery within 24 hours after an attack. “Time is muscle. The quicker you get in, the better,” says Christopher Calhoun, Cytori’s chief executive officer. “You can’t do anything about dead tissue, but tissue that’s bruised and damaged—that’s revitalizable. If you can get new blood flow in there, that tissue comes back to life.”

1/27/11, Technology Review (MIT)