Heart Cells Made From Stem Cells Speed Up Research On Rare Disease

To study a disease, scientists like to look at cells from the diseased organ. But those cells aren't usually very easy for scientists to get their hands on.

Enlarge this image toggle caption Lior Gepstein Lior Gepstein

That's because patients are generally reluctant to part with their brain or heart cells, diseased or not, while they're still using them. Dead cells are easier to procure, but they tend to be less interesting than their living counterparts.

A way around the problem is something called an induced pluripotent stem cell, or iPS. These are ordinary skin cells -- something patients are willing to donate -- that are transformed into cells that can do two wonderful things: they can grow indefinitely in the lab, and they can be coaxed into becoming any type of cell in the body.

Now scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel have succeeded in using iPS cells to grow a collection of heart cells. What's particularly special about these cells is that they came from a patient with one of the inherited forms of long QT syndrome. And they can be used to test new treatments for the disease.

Long QT syndrome speeds up heartbeats, and can cause fainting. It gets its name from the abnormal electrical signals the heart gives off -- signals that be seen in a patient's EKG.

For unknown reasons, people with long QT syndrome can go without symptoms for years, and then suddenly drop dead from cardiac arrest. The Food and Drug Administration has warned that some heart medications may exacerbate it.

As researchers report in the journal Nature, the new iPS-derived heart cells developed in the lab show the same electrical irregularities of QT syndrome as the intact heart does, which means they can be good models for new drugs.

The next step will be to see if scientists can find drugs that will correct the irregularities in the cells before trying the drugs out on humans suffering from it. The scientists hope their stem cell technique will also be useful for testing drugs for individual patients with other diseases in the future.