With more than 11 million Indians suffering from heart attacks every year, India will have the largest number of heart patients in the world by 2020, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates. This was stated by Dr R L Kumar, an advisor of the US-based `bioheart` while making a presentation on ``skeletal myoblasts for treatment of congestive heart failure`` at the ongoing international conference on emerging trends in biotechnology ``stem cells --technology, potential and trends”. Stating that heart attacks cause permanent damage to the heart muscle, he said that a lot of interest had been generated in using stem cell technology to repair the damaged organs, including the heart and brain. Plans were afoot to introduce the most advanced `stem cell therapy` at a local super speciality hospital in Hyderabad, he added.
Dr Kumar said that bioheart had developed a new treatment using patients` own muscle cells to replace scar tissue in the heart to improve the functioning of heart muscle. In this procedure muscle cells are taken from the patients` thigh and the immature muscle cells are separated out using cell processing. These immature cells are then multiplied into several millions of cells in a laboratory.
The cells are then injected into the scar tissue of the heart using a specialised technique to support and improve the overall functioning of the heart muscle, Dr Kumar explained. Bureau Report