French scientists reported in a new issue of The Lancet that they successfully repaired damaged sheep's heart muscle with mouse embryonic stem cells, which means that embryonic stem cells may be used to treat human heart disease in the future. A heart attack can damage the heart muscles and blood vessels, making the blood flow to the heart slow. Scientists have long been looking for ways to repair the heart muscle. Some experts believe that we can try to do this work by using stem cells with powerful differentiation capabilities. Previously, scientists had developed mature stem cells extracted from the patient's spinal cord into heart cells, infused into the patient's own heart, and improved their heart's blood circulation. Because embryonic stem cells are more capable of differentiation than mature stem cells, scientists believe that using embryonic stem cells to repair myocardium will be better. Scientists have previously used rat embryonic stem cells to successfully repair the heart muscle of mice. To prove that this method is also applicable to large mammals, scientists at the National Research Center in France recently conducted experiments on sheep suffering from heart disease. They first induced a heart attack in 18 sheep, and then introduced into the laboratory mouse embryonic stem cells the growth factors that differentiated them into heart cells. Subsequently, the treated embryonic stem cells were injected into the site of damage to the heart of nine sheep. The experimental results showed that embryonic stem cells adhered to damaged parts of the sheep's heart and successfully developed into heart tissue. The left ventricular function of sheep treated with stem cells increased by an average of 10%. At the same time, the left ventricular function of the untreated sheep was reduced by 6.6%. The researchers said that because the size of the sheep's heart is close to the human heart, the success of this experiment has provided experience with the use of embryonic stem cells to treat human heart disease.
