Roar’s Deputy Editor in Chief reporting a groundbreaking discovery made by scientists at King’s.Â
Scientists at King’s College London have made a landmark discovery that could change the way that heart attacks are treated. Heart attacks occur if the coronary arteries, which are the main blood supply to the heart, are suddenly blocked causing damage to the organ. Even if someone survives a heart attack, it can still have many severe long-term complications such as abnormal heart rhythms, heart failure or cardiac arrest. However, a team lead by Professor Maura Giacca have found a way to potentially reverse this heart tissue damage.
Professor Giacca spoke on the discovery, saying: “We are all born with a set number of muscle cells in our heart and they are exactly the same ones we will die with. Our goal has been to find a treatment that can convince surviving cells to proliferate. We are using exactly the same technology as the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to inject micro-RNAs to the heart, reaching surviving heart cells and pushing their proliferation.”
In essence, their methodology of using mRNA borrows a lot of technology from the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines. The mRNA is a molecule that is injected into the body and acts as a template for our body to create proteins. In the case of the Covid 19 vaccine, our body is told to produce a weak Covid-19 viral protein which helps our immune system respond quicker and more effectively to a real Coronavirus infection. Professor Giacca’s team has found that we can use mRNA to tell our body to create proteins that aid in the regeneration of heart cells. Our body has no other way of regenerating these cells, which shows how groundbreaking the discovery is.
According to the British Heart Foundation, there are as many as 100,000 hospital admissions each year due to heart attacks: that’s one every five minutes. Furthermore, around 1.4 million people alive in the UK today have survived a heart attack. If this technology receives regulatory approval, a treatment could be administered in the ambulance or the hospital which could prevent a heart attack from turning into a more-serious heart failure. The way we treat heart attacks could soon be revolutionised, improving the lives of millions.
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