London, August 6 (ANI): A University of Washington-led research has made a major advance in efforts to regenerate damaged hearts.

Grafts of human cardiac muscle cells, grown from embryonic stem cells, coupled electrically and contracted synchronously with host muscle following transplantation in guinea pig hearts.

The grafts also reduced the incidence of arrhythmias (irregular heart rhythms) in a guinea pig model of myocardial infarction (commonly known as a heart attack).

These results provide strong evidence that human cardiac muscle cell grafts meet physiological criteria for true heart regeneration. This supports the continued development of human embryonic stem cell-based heart therapies for both mechanical and electrical repair of the heart, said Dr. Michael Laflamme, the paper's senior author.

During a myocardial infarction the flow of oxygen-rich blood to the heart muscle is interrupted by formation of a clot, causing death of the down-stream heart muscle and its eventual replacement by scar tissue. This can cause mechanical problems with filling and emptying the heart, and it can also interfere with the electrical signals that pace the heartbeat.

In this study, the guinea pigs' hearts had an injury to the left ventricle, the thick walled lower chamber in the heart that pumps oxygenated blood to the body. The injury left a scar and thinned the ventricle, which showed both reduced pump function and greater susceptibility to arrhythmias.

Injured hearts that received the human cardiac muscle cell grafts showed partial re-muscularization of the scarred left ventricle.

Consistent with previous studies, tests showed that the injured hearts with the human cardiac cell grafts had improved mechanical function.

More surprisingly, these hearts showed fewer arrhythmias than did injured hearts without such grafts.

We showed a couple years ago that transplanting human embryonic stem cell-derived heart muscle cells improves the pumping activity of injured hearts, said Dr. Michael Laflamme, UW associate professor of pathology and a member of the UW Center for Cardiovascular Biology and the Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine.

In this recent paper, he explained, we show that the transplantation of these cells also reduces the incidence of arrhythmias [heart rhythm disturbances].ecause arrhythmias are a major cause of death in patients after a heart attack, Laflamme pointed out, this effect might be clinically useful if proven successful in large animal models as well.

This finding has been reported in the Aug. 5 issue of Nature. (ANI)