After Patients Beat the Odds of Dying, Scientists Will Start a Heart Stem Cell Trial in the UAE

Ten people with very bad heart disease were told they had six months to two years to live. After getting stem cell injections for research purposes, most of them are still living about eight years later. The scientist who came up with the treatment has now chosen Abu Dhabi to host the next major controlled trial of the therapy.

When he found embryonic stem cells in 2007, Sir Martin Evans won the Nobel Prize. He made the announcement at the Abu Dhabi Future Health Summit on Wednesday. Evans, the founder of the biotechnology company Cardiogeni in the UK, said that the Department of Health in Abu Dhabi had given him the regulatory support and encouragement that he had not been able to find anywhere else.

During coronary artery bypass surgery, mesenchymal stem cells from bone marrow are injected straight into the heart muscle as part of a treatment called CLXR-001. The cells don’t stay in the body forever. Evans said that they seem to send a biological signal that wakes up heart muscle that has been sleeping.He said, “We’re using these cells to send some kind of message to the heart muscle, which is damaged but can get better.

Evans said that during a heart attack, some muscle cells die and turn into scar tissue, while others go into hibernation, which means they are still alive but not beating. The cells that were injected seemed to wake up these muscles that had been sleeping. “What we seem to have been able to do is to have a positive effect on these reserve muscles to come back into use again,” he stated. The European Phase IIa trial showed statistically significant improvements in all measured outcomes, including heart function, reduction in scarring and quality of life.

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