Last August, Dr. Richard Schatz, a cardiologist and research director at Scripps Green Hospital in La Jolla, injected either bone marrow stem cells or a mere placebo of salty water &endash; to this day even Schatz doesn’t know which &endash; into the heart muscle of a Las Vegas man with end-stage coronary artery disease.
Schatz carried out the injection nonsurgically by inserting a catheter into an artery in the man’s groin, guiding it up the aorta and across the aortic valve into the heart’s oxygen-starved left ventricle, plunging the catheter’s needle into a small circle of ailing tissue, and finally injecting either cells or a placebo directly into cardiac muscle.
Anthony Salas, the 58-year-old patient, “was one of the sickest people I’ve ever met,” recalled Schatz. “He had failed all conventional therapies” &endash; bypass surgeries, stents and angioplasty &endash; “and was maxed out on every cardiac medication he could take” &endash; calcium channel blockers, beta blockers and nitroglycerin. Summed up Schatz, “Tony led a chair-to-bed existence.”
One good thing to be said for Salas’ serious condition was that it made him eligible for a clinical trial of bone marrow stem cells designed and led by Douglas Losordo, chief of cardiovascular research at Caritas St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Boston.
Stem cells in bone marrow are referred to as “adult” to distinguish them from the “embryonic” stem cells in the early embryo. Also residing in skin, muscle, intestine, brain, eye, liver and other organs, adult stem cells make specialized cells for the tissue they occupy, in contrast to embryonic stem cells, which theoretically can make any mature cell in the body.
