Michael Jones, known to friends as Mike, had
suffered from congestive heart failure due to multiple blocked arteries. As a
result, he had permanent scarring of his heart muscle. On March 23, the
66-year-old had coronary artery bypass surgery at Jewish Hospital. During the
procedure, his physicians took tissue from a portion of the upper chamber of
his heart, which was sent to Piero Anversa of Harvard University and Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, where his cardiac stem cells were retrieved
and grown.
This past July 17, Mike became the world’s
first recipient of an adult cardiac stem cell infusion procedure, from which he
continues to recover. During the procedure, his own cardiac stem cells were
injected into the heart scar tissue using a minimally invasive catheterization
procedure, in which a catheter was fed through a leg artery into his heart. The
procedure was performed at Jewish
Hospital by Sohail Ikram, M.D., University of Louisville Professor of Medicine
and Director and Chief of Invasive and Interventional Cardiology.
Jones’ procedure was part of the world’ s
first phase one FDA-approved clinical trial using adult cardiac stem cells to
treat disease. The clinical trial is being conducted by a team of University of
Louisville physicians at Jewish Hospital. Study leader Roberto Bolli, Jewish Hospital Heart and
Lung Institute Chair in Cardiology and Director of the University of
Louisville’s Institute for Molecular Cardiology, says: “We continue to enroll
patients in this first-of-its-kind clinical trial. We hope to help the heart
regenerate its own tissue and improve heart function.” Bolli is
participating in the clinical trial with several other leaders in the field of
cardiovascular and stem cell medicine. Additional patients have enrolled in the
clinical trial, all of whom will receive the cardiac stem cell therapy.
Dr. Bolli noted
that another facility in California is conducting a similar stem cell clinical
trial. “The difference between what we have done and what another
institute nationally has done is that we have injected a pure population of
stem cells, the c-kit-positive cells. The other institution injected
cardiosphere-derived cells, which are a mixture of primitive and partially
differentiated cells, complicating the recognition of the actual therapeutic
cell. Our study involves a specific, well-characterized population of
undifferentiated cells: the c-kit-positive cardiac stem cells are
self-renewing, clonogenic and multipotent, which are the fundamental properties
of stem cells,” he explains.
News Release: World’s First Cardiac Adult
Stem Cell Patient Receives Infusion www.medicalnewstoday.com July 25, 2009
