Fantastic Voyage Into the Heart
Saturday, January 07, 2006
"According to the Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI), researchers from the Harvard Medical School have written a sequel to 'Fantastic voyage,' the 1966 sci-fi movie. By injecting self-assembling peptide nanofibers loaded with pro-survival factors into rats, they've showed that the animals could be protected from heart failures. So far, the researchers have not extended their experiments to humans."read full article...
Other heart therapy researches:Scientists have found a way to turn mouse embryonic stem cells into beating heart muscle cells - a result that could lead to the use of embryonic stem cells in cardiac therapy, and possibly even drugs that can prompt the body to regenerate heart cells on its own.
Because embryonic stem cells can turn into any type of cell in the body, many scientists believe they hold incredible promise for treating a variety of degenerative diseases.
"We have discovered a synthetic chemical, named cardiogenol, which can selectively differentiate embryonic stem cells into beating cardiac muscle cells," says Xu Wu, a graduate student in the lab of Peter G. Schultz, Ph.D, professor of chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.
