Umbilical Cord Cells Outperform Bone Marrow Cells in Repairing Damaged Hearts

Research Points to New Hope For Heart Attack Patients

TORONTO — People recovering from heart attacks are being given new hope this month with the release of a new study on stem cells taken from human umbilical cord tissue.

Mesenchymal cells — which stimulate tissue repair, control inflammation and are used in stem cell therapies — are most commonly harvested from bone marrow.

But the new study shows that, when injected directly into damaged heart tissue, stem cells from the tissues surrounding the blood vessels of the human umbilical cord are superior to existing bone marrow stem cell therapies.

The study used standard tests to measure heart function after the new therapy was administered. The new cell therapy was twice as effective at repairing damage to heart tissue than no treatment, even up to a year later.

"We're hoping that this translates into fewer people developing complications of heart failure because their muscle function after a heart attack is better," said Professor Armand Keating, Professor of Medicine, Director, Division of Hematology and Epstein Chair in Cell Therapy and Transplantation, cross-appointed to the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering (IBBME).

Keating, who is also the Director of the Cell Therapy Program at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and University Health Network, released the results of the study in Cell Transplantation this month.

Keating and his team are completing more pre-clinical studies, and hope to begin clinical trials of the umbilical cord tissue cells on patients within 12-18 months.

But Professor Keating is also interested in conducting further research to find ways to overcome the damaging effects of chemotherapy on heart tissue — an agonizing problem for some patients who may be cured of their cancer only to confront heart failure as a result of treatment.

There are more than 250 clinical trials being conducted worldwide using mesenchymal cells to investigate the treatment of a variety of diseases, including a serious complication of bone marrow transplantation called graft-versus-host disease, autoimmune disorders, neurological diseases and tissue injury arising from lung and liver disease.

Tissue Regeneration Therapeutics (TRT), the Toronto-based company that created the technology platform for manufacturing the cells, provides umbilical cord tissue cells to leading researchers around the world free of charge.  However other companies or manufacturers can buy the cells for research — which supports Canadian high tech jobs.

"We have a comprehensive family of international patents to protect this important cell source," says IBBME Professor J.E. Davies, and President of TRT. A pioneer in this relatively new field, Davies filed his first patent on the technology in 2003.