Heart attack
Almost 60 million people in the US, or 20 per cent of the US population, have some form of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) which kills more than one million people annually.
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Coronary heart disease, which includes angina pectoris and heart attack, also known as myocardial infarction (MI), accounts for 50 per cent of all deaths from CVD, making it the single largest cause of death in the US.
A heart attack occurs when an artery supplying the heart becomes completely blocked and causes death of the cells in an area of heart muscle that is starved of the blood's oxygen and nutrients. |
Today, about 80 per cent of patients will survive a heart attack due to improved diagnosis, emergency care and methods for unblocking the obstructed artery. However, they are likely to develop heart failure, a chronic condition in which the heart is unable to pump blood effectively, due to a shortage of blood to surviving heart muscle. Almost 50 per cent of heart attack victims become disabled with heart failure within six years and almost 50 per cent of those die within five years.
Treatments for heart attack are relatively ineffective in preventing heart failure and none of them is capable of increasing the formation of blood vessels or inducing cardiac repair to minimise the risk of heart failure.
Pre-clinical trials, in which MPCs were injected into hearts soon after a heart attack, have shown substantial increases in the number of blood vessels of the type able to improve the flow of blood to healthy, but susceptible, heart muscle. This increased blood flow was associated with significant improvement in heart function due to cardiac regeneration and protection.
Consequently, Angioblast believes that injection of its MPC products into heart muscle shortly after a heart attack has the potential to become a routine procedure to prevent the complication of heart failure.
Congestive heart failure
Congestive heart failure (CHF) affects about five million people, or two per cent of the population, in the US alone. There are 550,000 new cases diagnosed each year, and 45,000 deaths from CHF. As many as 20 million people may have unsuspected heart failure and are likely to develop symptoms within five years.
Typically, CHF occurs when an injured heart muscle is unable to pump strongly enough to meet the need for blood of the body's other organs. Patients with CHF are constantly tired, short of breath and in and out of hospital. One-third of them require repeat hospitalisation within three months of discharge. Accounting for 3.5 million hospital stays per year, heart failure is the leading cause of hospitalisation in the US.
Patients usually take combination drug therapy including diuretics and angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors to reduce the amount of fluid in the body, glycosides to increase the force of the heart's contractions and beta blockers to reduce activity of the heart and enhance survival. These drug therapies do not regenerate heart muscle or rebuild heart tissue. Instead, they alleviate the symptoms of heart failure such as shortness of breath and fatigue, but not without significant side effects.
Angioblast is developing MPC products capable of rebuilding damaged heart tissue by a two-pronged attack. They will induce the formation of new small arteries to supply more blood to damaged heart muscle and will also directly form new heart muscle cells. It is anticipated that MPCs will be delivered to the heart either by direct injection or surgical placement of a biocompatible patch, and will be used with existing drug therapies.
The Technology
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