Cell Therapy for Damage After Heart Attack

An experimental new cell therapy is designed to repair damage to cardiac muscle resulting from a heart attack.

The technique under investigation, called autologous cell therapy, involves injecting a patient's own muscle cells, or myoblasts, into damaged regions of the heart during a coronary artery bypass operation. The cells are obtained several weeks in advance from the patient's leg during a biopsy and are then cultured in a laboratory before being injected into the heart muscle.

This particular cardiac cell therapy is being studied in a phase 2 clinical trial taking place at more than 12 hospitals in Europe and North America. The trial, called the MAGIC (myoblast, autologous, graft in ischemic cardiomyopathy) trial, intends to test cardiac cell therapy in up to 300 patients. The therapy is based on the work of Prof. Menasche of the George Pompidou European Hospital in Paris (France), who was among the first clinicians to test whether autologous cell therapy could be used either to stop or reverse the damage done to cardiac muscle by a heart attack. The trial is being conducted by MG Biotherapeutics, a joint venture of Genzyme Corp. (Cambridge, MA, USA) and Medtronic, Inc. (Minneapolis, MN, USA).

"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,” said the Heart Hospital's William McKenna, professor of cardiology at University College London (UK), one of the participating hospitals. Prof. McKenna is the principal investigator of the trial.





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