JCC biomedical scientist discovers in vivo primings Heart disease has become the leading cause of death worldwide, with the majority of fatalities caused by coronary artery disease and correlating heart failure. Dr Kiwon Ban, JCC’s Assistant Professor of Department of Biomedical Sciences, always feels a pang of sympathy for late-stage heart-failure patients. “They have very few options. The possibility of a heart transplant is dependent on the availability of suitable hearts donated by others, but since these are limited many patients die waiting. Heart devices are limited by battery life: battery replacement requires surgery, exposing these patients – mostly the elderly in their 60s or 70s, to greater risks,” he explained.
after the IPC stimulus, was maintained for only 4 to 6 hours. Dr Ban’s novel application, however, keeps the priming effect of hMSCs more consistent and effective. The primed human bone marrow (BMMSCs) achieved a higher survival rate compared with unprimed BM-MSCs in the patches attached to the myocardial infarction (MI)-induced hearts, which led to a significant improvement in cardiac function and an enhancement of vessel formation after MI.
This is why Dr Ban has been dedicated to developing novel therapeutic applications for stem cell-based cardiac regeneration.
Maintains hMSCs priming effect His recent discovery of “in vivo priming”, which can prime human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) in intact hearts in vivo, has been published in the internationally acclaimed journal Science Advances. The current stem cell-based therapeutic applications have their own limitations. For example, hMSCs only achieves approximately 3 to 4% improvement in the left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), and priming application only provides a short-term benefit. The protective effects conferred by ischemic preconditioning (IPC), which begins within minutes
賽馬會動物醫學及生命科學院 I 2020 春季
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