Mending hearts
How Karolinska is pumping out cardiac progenitors for heart repair
A collaboration between the Karolinska Institute, Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital and other organizations has identified a type of human cardiac progenitor that can rebuild injured heart tissue in mice, and developed a protocol for generating large numbers of the cells in vitro. Karolinska has filed for patents on the technology and is spinning out the Swedish newco Procella Therapeutics AB to develop the cells for regenerative therapies.
The work, which was published last month in Nature Communications, was led by Kenneth Chien, a professor of cardiovascular research at Karolinska, and builds on a 2009 Nature study from Chien's group, then at Massachusetts General Hospital. In that study, Chien's group showed that expression of ISL LIM homeobox 1 (ISL1) marked a population of cardiac progenitors in human fetal tissue that generated the three major heart lineages - cardiomyocytes, smooth muscle and endothelial cells - within the right atrium and ventricle and the outflow tract. Then the group showed the progenitors could be derived from embryonic stem cell (ESC) lines, and differentiated the three heart lineages in vitro.However, the progenitors had limited capacity for expansion, making it difficult to obtain enough for disease modeling or regenerative medicine...