Fighting against heart failure

Third-year biomedical science Ph.D. student Xiaoming Fan is researching how to limit muscle damage after a heart attack with the help of his mentor Jiang Tian, associate professor in the division of cardiovascular medicine.

According to the CDC, one in four deaths are due to heart attacks. The health problems following a heart attack are also deadly.

“After a heart attack, also called myocardial infarction, the blood supply will be blocked or limited to the infarcted area, which causes muscle cell death and formation of fibrosis,” Tian said in an email interview.

Muscle cell death and the formation of fibrosis — the thickening and scarring of connective tissue — is what Fan and Tian are trying to limit after a heart attack.

“Heart failure following heart attack is one of the leading causes of death all over the world,” Fan wrote. “To some extent, they are preventable and treatable.”

“A typical heart attack happens when coronary artery, the blood vessel that provides nutrients and oxygen for heart, is blocked,” Fan wrote. “Without blood supply, the heart cells will die and be replaced by scar tissue. Following such changes, beating capacity of the heart will decrease due to loss of heart cells.”

After a heart attack, healthy heart cells are also affected over time because they grow larger to compensate for the non-functional scar tissue, Fan wrote.

“Unfortunately, enlarged heart cells lead to more heart cell deaths and the formation of more scar tissue even in healthy areas of the heart,” Fan wrote. “Together, these changes are called heart remodeling and can eventually lead to overall heart failure and death.”

The focus of Fan’s research is on the mechanism that leads to scar formation, capillary artery loss and heart cell loss after a heart attack. His aim is to find a treatment for those post-heart attack problems.

“We want to find a potential treatment for heart failure after heart attacks,” Fan wrote. “We have discovered a combination of cell growth factors that improve heart function after heart attacks. And we are now studying the possible mechanism that leads to such improvement.”

Tian explained in more depth the cells that are being studied and the effects they can have.

“We are testing the possibility that some specialized cells, called cardiac progenitor cells or stem cells, can be activated or enhanced after a heart attack,” Tian wrote. “These cells have the capacity to become functional endothelial cells, which forms new blood vessels to supply blood to the heart muscle cells or help prevent them from death after heart attack.”

Fan noted that though there are treatment choices for heart failure, they mostly aim to relieve symptoms of heart failure rather than to prevent heart cell loss.

“Working in clinical for three years in China, I’ve seen lots of heart failure patients die from gradual heart function loss,” Fan wrote. “So a promised treatment that aims at heart cell loss and scar formation is needed to allow heart failure patients to survive and improve life quality.”

Fan has been working on this project for a year and a half and expects to continue for another year. He feels he has achieved good results thus far and is hopeful that they will be able to publish their results in a journal next year.

“We have discovered some positive results on the project,” Fan wrote. “We are now confirming the results we’ve found and studying the possible mechanism that leads to the improvement of heart function following growth factor treatment.”