Abstract
Ischemic heart attack is the leading cause of death worldwide. Ten percent of cases will die within an hour. Of the survivors, around 30% will have suffered a severe infarction which will lead to the irreparable destruction of 1 to 2 billion myocardial cells, causing an irreversible secondary heart failure with a poor prognosis in the short. The heart is a totally differentiated organ with a very low capacity for self-regeneration. No current treatment can prevent this fatal outcome, but only slow it down. For these reasons, cell therapy has generated enormous hope, but achieved somewhat disappointing results, depending on the type/source of cells which were used. From the end of 2002, our group conducted a Pilot study using immuno-selected autologous peripheral-blood (PB) CD34(+) cells in a small cohort of patients who had experienced a heart attack with poor prognosis. Three of these patients were immediately considered for heart transplant but lacked a readily available donor. CD34(+) cells were trans-epicardially delivered at the end of a coronary artery by-pass graft (CABG) operation without reperfusing the ischemic area, which was performed on a compassionate basis. All but one patient showed a marked and sustained improvement in their cardiac function parameters from the baseline values, associated with both cardiac tissue repair and revascularization, as demonstrated by PetScan examination. The patients' outcomes have been recently updated. Six out of seven patients have survived in good enough conditions for at least 12 years after cell therapy, including those three initially recommended for heart transplant and who have avoided it. Presently, five out of seven patients are still alive with an average follow-up of 17 years (range 16-20 years), which is very unusual after CABG for patients with such a poor initially prognosis.