Stem cell research gives heart patients hope

05:22 PM CDT on Tuesday, August 17, 2004

By Nancy Holland / 11 News

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HOUSTON -- This week doctors at the Texas Heart Institute hope to inject another patient with stem cells directly into the heart.

It would be the sixth patient in a new study in this country.

Doctors only use the patient's cells, making it less controversial than fetal stem cell transplants.

There is also international research that doctors around the world hope could lessen the need for human heart transplants.

Robert Lee has volunteered to be part of the new study at the Texas Heart Institute.

Maybe the name encouraged him to live his life as a hard-charging kind of man. Now he has heart failure.

If chosen he, like other patients, would have bone marrow taken from his hip.

Doctors would isolate his stem cells and inject 30 million of them into his heart.

"I just want to be full of energy and stay alive I mean, that's my theme song, ‘Stayin' Alive’," explains Lee.

The Chief of Cardiology at the Texas Heart Institute says some of the stem cells become new blood vessels, some new heart muscle cells.

"Other cells fuse, latch onto existent heart muscle cells in sort of a blob and they exchange nuclear material,” explains Dr. James Willerson. “And we think this fusion process allows the injected cell to rescue the injured cell.”

Around the world, scientists are working on their own stem cell research but people in the Texas Medical Center tell us they don't see that as competition.

In Tokyo, researchers pulled stem cells from a leg muscle and grew a cardiac patch.

At a meeting at Rice University one doctor was encouraged at its promise.

"We prepared a sheet, cell sheets and put onto the heart directly so 100 percent transplantation we get,” explains Dr. Masayuki Yamato of Tokyo Women’s Medical University.

Still in animal testing, the stem cell cardiac patch could move to humans in less than five years.

For patients and for doctors faced with limited hearts available for transplant the promise can't be fulfilled too soon.