Milles' heart attack left 21 percent of his heart muscle infarcted. He underwent his biopsy May 24, and received his infusion of stem cells on June 29.

Milles and the other patients in the study will be monitored for six months. Complete results are scheduled to be available in late 2010.


Isolating Heart Cells Instead of Bone Marrow

Marban, who holds the Mark Siegel Family Foundation Chair at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute and directs Cedars-Sinai's Board of Governors Heart Stem Cell Center, said the cardiac stem cell procedure is a logical step forward from recent studies in which cardiac patients have been treated with stem cells derived from bone marrow.

Studies over the past eight years have shown that more than 500 cardiac patients have experienced modest improvement when treated with bone marrow stem cells. However, bone marrow stem cells are not predestined to regenerate heart muscle. Heart stem cells are naturally programmed to do just that and could prove to be more successful in regrowing healthy cardiac tissue, Dr. Marban says.

"If successful, we hope the procedure could be widely available in a few years and could be more broadly applied to cardiac patients," Marban notes. "For example, if patients are able to re-grow damaged heart muscle via stem cell therapy, there could be lesser demand for expensive and risky treatments such as heart transplants," he says.

Patent Pending

The process to grow the cardiac-derived stem cells involved in the study was developed by Marban when he was on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University. The university has filed for a patent on that intellectual property, and has licensed it to a company in which Dr. Marban has a financial interest. No funds from that company were used to support the clinical study. All funding was derived from the National Institutes of Health, the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Source: Cedars-Sinai Medical Center

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