Hematopoietic cytokines for the repair of myocardial infarction

心脏病仍然是导致心力衰竭最常见的原因之一。与皮肤或骨髓等其他组织不同，心脏病发作后，心脏无法自我修复。最近，人们认识到骨髓细胞在一定程度上可以修复心脏。这是如何实现的尚不清楚，但它可能是由于新血管的形成，也许是新的心脏肌肉。不幸的是，骨髓细胞的修复不是很有效。提高骨髓细胞修复心脏效率的一种方法是给人骨髓生长因子，增加血液中骨髓细胞的数量，从而增加心脏损伤部位的数量。我们的初步研究表明，尽管修复的效率仍然不足以作为一种有用的治疗方法，但情况就是如此。该项目将研究骨髓生长因子如何改善心脏病发作后的心脏修复，并探索提高修复效率的方法，以便在人体中进行试验。

Heart attacks remain one of the most common causes of heart failure. Unlike many other tissues such as the skin or bone marrow, the heart is unable to repair itself following a heart attack. Recently it has been recognised that bone marrow cells can to a small degree repair the heart. How this is done is not known but it may be due to the formation of new blood vessels and perhaps new heart muscle. Unfortunately, the repair by bone marrow cells is not very efficient. One way of improving the efficiency of heart repair by bone marrow cells is to give people bone marrow growth factors that increase the number of bone marrow cells in the blood and thus, increase the number at the site of heart injury. Our preliminary research shows that this is the case although the efficiency of repair is still not enough as a useful therapy. This project will examine how bone marrow growth factors improve heart repair following heart attacks and explore ways of improving the efficiency of repair to permit trials in humans.