Human Heart Muscle Can Regrow After Heart Attack — SkimNews
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- University of Sydney researchers demonstrated that human heart muscle cells can divide and produce new cells after a heart attack — the first confirmed instance of this regenerative process in humans, previously seen only in mice
- Dr. Robert Hume, first author from the Faculty of Medicine and Health and Charles Perkins Centre, said the discovery shows scarred heart areas are not irreparably damaged, but the natural repair response is too weak to offset the attack's effects on its own
- The team collected living "pre-mortem" heart tissue from consenting patients undergoing bypass surgery at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, enabling laboratory study of human heart biology closer to real patient conditions than previous models allowed
- A heart attack can destroy up to one-third of the cells in the human heart, and cardiovascular disease accounts for roughly 24% of all deaths in Australia, where about 144,000 people live with heart failure against only ~115 transplants performed annually
- Professor Sean Lal, senior author and heart failure cardiologist, said the team has already identified several proteins linked to heart regeneration in mice that may now be targets for amplifying the same response in humans
- The study was published in Circulation Research (DOI: 10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.125.327486), with the tissue-sampling technique developed jointly by Professor Paul Bannon and Professor Sean Lal across the University of Sydney, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, and The Baird Institute
Why it matters: With roughly 144,000 Australians living with heart failure and only about 115 transplants performed each year, the transplant gap is enormous — and any therapy that amplifies the heart's own regrowth capacity could eventually offer an alternative to organ replacement for the vast majority of patients who never reach a transplant list.
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