Healing a Scarred Heart: Turning Fibroblasts into Progenitor Cells

As scientists know that scarred heart tissue may not beat like it once it did, researchers hope that by reprogramming cells, they could potentially help the physical heart's injured tissues regenerate themselves.

Previous studies have shown that a cell type involved in scarring heart muscle cells has yielded a low success rate. However, associate professor of biomedical engineering and head of the Cell Signaling in Engineered Tissues Lab, Andrew Putnam, said he may be able to help more properly repair the organ.

"Many reprogramming studies don't consider the environment that the cells are in - they don't consider anything other than the genes," he said, via a press release. "The environment can dictate the expression of those genes."

For the study, Putnam and a post-doctoral researcher in the lab, Yen Peng Kong, attempted to turn scarring cells, otherwise known as fibroblasts, into heart muscle cells while growing them in gels of carrying stiffness. They then compared the soft commercial gel with medium-stiffness fibrin. All of the fibroblasts used came from mouse embryos, which began the conversion to heart muscle cells that Kong infected with a specially designed virus used to carry out genes expressed by stem cells.

Background information from the study notes that as the tissues were fooled into stem cell behavior, these fibroblasts actually transformed themselves into stem-cell-like progenitor cells. In turn, this encouraged the cells to divide and grow into colonies that could potentially help ease the next transition of heart muscle cells.

Following seven days into the study, Kong fed the cells a new mixture of protein that encouraged the growth of heart tissue. This helped push them to adopt a new heart muscle identity, according to the study. Just a few days later, he notes that some of the colonies were contracting simultaneously as heart muscle colonies.

At the end of the study, the researchers said that they still hope to discover how fibrin works to support the heart muscle better.

What do you think?

More information regarding the study can be found via the Nature's Scientific Reports.