New stem cell therapy shows promise.

• Position: Heart Attacks - Brief article

To date, cell therapy developed by Eduardo Marban, formerly of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md., and now with the Heart Institute, Los Angeles, Calif., is the only treatment shown to regenerate the injured human heart. In this therapy, human heart tissue is used to grow specialized stem cells, which then are injected back into the patient's heart.

"We have seen encouraging results in patients with this treatment, and it has the potential to revolutionize how we treat heart attack victims,'" Marban explains. "Further study will allow us to better understand how it works, which we hope will lead us to even more stem-cell based treatments for the heart"

During a heart attack, clots form suddenly on top of cholesterol-laden plaques, which block the flow of blood to the heart muscle. This causes living heart tissue to die and be replaced by a scar. The larger the scar, the higher the chance of death or disability from the heart attack.

Conventional treatments aim to limit the injury by opening the clogged...