Dr Charmaine Griffiths
Chief Executive, British Heart Foundation (BHF)
Regenerative medicine is at the frontier of cardiovascular research. It’s a field of science looking at ways to teach the heart to heal itself.
Our hearts are unique. By the time we are 70, we still have most of the heart cells we were born with. However, because the heart is in continuous motion and never stops pumping blood around the body throughout your lifetime, it doesn’t have the power to repair itself when it gets damaged.
An incurable condition
One of the most common causes of heart damage is heart attack. It is a blockage in an artery supplying the heart muscle, starving it of the oxygen it needs. When this happens, the heart muscle cells can die, and this can lead to heart failure where the heart cannot pump blood as well as it needs to. Heart failure is a debilitating condition that affects almost one million people in the UK; and currently, there is no cure.
This is where regenerative medicine offers hope. The British Heart Foundation (BHF) is the charity of the year for the 2022 TCS London Marathon, and the £3 million raised by our BHF runners will fund nine projects that will accelerate progress in regenerative medicine and find a desperately needed cure for heart failure.
They take stem cells and give them a specific mixture of proteins called growth factors to stimulate them into becoming heart muscle cells.
Beating heart muscle patches
One of these projects is led by Professor Sanjay Sinha who is running the marathon to raise funds to help power his groundbreaking research. His team at the University of Cambridge are growing real heart tissue in a dish. The result is a heart-healing patch of living heart tissue that contracts in a coordinated way, just like the heart does when it beats.
A revolutionary approach
The team aims to graft the patches onto damaged areas of a person’s heart to repair it, just like a sticking plaster. But the process is not simple. Sanjay’s team uses stem cells — special cells which can become any type of cell in the body — to make the patch.
They take stem cells and give them a specific mixture of proteins called growth factors to stimulate them into becoming heart muscle cells. They then put these cells on a “scaffold” and allow them to grow for a couple of weeks, carefully nurturing them into a patch. The BHF hopes that the inspirational potential of the heart-healing patch will revolutionise the way we care for people with damaged hearts and move away from merely treating the symptoms of heart failure, toward a cure.
The BHF are encouraging the nation to get behind Professor Sanjay Sinha to help make the Heart Healing Patch a reality. To find out more visit: gosanjay.bhf.org.uk
