Local research on the regeneration of damaged heart muscles through the infusion of stem cells holds promise as a major international medical breakthrough, although speculating about its possible success at this stage may be premature, a researcher has warned.
A number of South Africans are said to be the first guinea pigs in the medical trial aimed at creating an alternative to the heart transplant. It has been conducted over the past eight months, although it has not yet been peer-reviewed, according to media reports.
Rapport reported that all the patients with "new hearts", taking part in the "highly secretive" trial in Cape Town, showed marked improvement over the past few months. Stem cells were reportedly harvested from tissue in the adult patients’ thigh muscles, grown in a laboratory and injected into their damaged heart muscles.
But Dawie van Velden, a senior researcher at the medical faculty of Stellenbosch University, warns that the public could easily become over-optimistic about such medical news.
"This modernistic approach to curing heart disease sounds wonderful and promising, but it is still in its beginning stages. One must be careful not to sensationalise research that hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet," he said.
