Artificial Hearts May Regenerate Muscle Cells at Faster Rate Than Healthy Heart: Researchers - Video

A research team co-led by a physician-scientist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Tucson's Sarver Heart Center found that a subset of artificial heart patients can regenerate heart muscle, which may open the door to new ways to treat and perhaps someday cure heart failure. The results were published in the journal Circulation.

“Skeletal muscle has a significant ability to regenerate after injury. If you’re playing soccer and you tear a muscle, you need to rest it, and it heals,” said Hesham Sadek, MD, PhD, director of the Sarver Heart Center and chief of the Division of Cardiology at the U of A College of Medicine – Tucson’s Department of Medicine. “When a heart muscle is injured, it doesn’t grow back. We have nothing to reverse heart muscle loss.”

The project began with tissue from artificial heart patients provided by colleagues at the University of Utah Health and School of Medicine. Researchers used their own innovative method of carbon dating human heart tissue to track whether these samples contained newly generated cells. The investigators found that patients with artificial hearts regenerated muscle cells at more than six times the rate of healthy hearts.

“This is the strongest evidence we have, so far, that human heart muscle cells can actually regenerate, which really is exciting, because it solidifies the notion that there is an intrinsic capacity of the human heart to regenerate,” Sadek said. “It also strongly supports the hypothesis that the inability of the heart muscle to ‘rest’ is a major driver of the heart’s lost ability to regenerate shortly after birth. It may be possible to target the molecular pathways involved in cell division to enhance the heart’s ability to regenerate.”

Reference: Derks, W., Rode, J., Collin, S., Rost, F., Heinke, P., Hariharan, A., ... & Bergmann, O. (2023). A latent cardiomyocyte regeneration potential in human heart disease. bioRxiv.