Abstract

LARA-MARTINEZ, Luis Andrés; NAVARRO-BETANCOURT, José Refugio  and  HERNANDEZ-GUTIERREZ, Salomón. Cellular therapy and cardiac regeneration: Where are we?. Rev. Mex. Cardiol [online]. 2012, vol.23, n.2, pp.72-79. ISSN 0188-2198.

Stem cell therapy is a promising resource for the treatment of ischemic heart disease; through direct or intravascular infusion of stem cells, functional capacity restitution is an achievable goal. Despite successful outcomes in animals, expected results have not been obtained in humans. Cell therapy for human beings has a series of ethical and practical concerns and insufficiently creditable. It has now been proven that stem cell therapy improves electromechanical performance of cardiac tissue itself; however, functional benefit is poorly convincing, even so, results are anything yet not discouraging. In order to accurately evaluate the benefit of stem cell therapy, larger clinical trials and less invasive follow-up procedures are needed. Nevertheless, cell survival is a particularly relevant issue for cell therapy; efficiency of the infusion procedure is variable and generally low; principally caused by three processes: apoptosis, ischemia and inflammation. The most assuring mean to increase cell viability is the overexpression of antiapoptotic proteins. Hence, the main challenge for cell therapy is to determine which cell line or lines are best suited for treatment. In this review, we describe the principal cell types currently used and proposed for cardiac regeneration: embryonic stem cells, pluripotent induced stem cells, bone-marrow derived cells, skeletal mioblasts and adipose tissue derived cells; and others.

Keywords : Cell therapy; pluripotent induced stem cells; ischemic heart disease, viability; functional benefit.

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