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Fantastic Voyage Into the Heart

Posted by Zonk on from the rat-superheroes-expected-soon dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "According to the Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI), researchers from the Harvard Medical School have written a sequel to 'Fantastic voyage,' the 1966 sci-fi movie. By injecting self-assembling peptide nanofibers loaded with pro-survival factors into rats, they've showed that the animals could be protected from heart failures. So far, the researchers have not extended their experiments to humans."

6 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Whoah... Flair for the dramatic... by Ruff_ilb · · Score: 5, Informative

    The title of the article is rather confusing... but here's my take -

    First of all, I doubt that this is going to be approved for human use any time soon, even IF they can prove a good success rate.

    Speaking of which, what IS their success rate? As promising as this seems, I don't know if I want this if it's a save-you-or-kill-you sort of treatment. However, their study results show that, in mice, it seems to work just fine.

    From TFA:

    "A blinded and randomized study in 96 rats showed that injecting nanofibers with PDGF-BB, but not nanofibers or PDGF-BB alone, decreased cardiomyocyte death and preserved systolic function after myocardial infarction. A separate blinded and randomized study in 52 rats showed that PDGF-BB delivered with nanofibers decreased infarct size after ischemia/reperfusion."

    "[Note: PDGF stands for "Platelet-derived growth factor" and is is one of the numerous proteins that regulate cell growth and division according to Wikipedia.]"

    I'm not a doctor/biologist/etc, but is this something we want to be messing with? I mean, sounds like encouraging excessive cell growth in the heart wouldn't be a good idea at all. It's one thing if the patient is dying, but quite another if people are taking this so they're at a lowered risk of a heart attack later. TFA doesn't seem to mention side effects at all, much less potential side effects in humans.

    I'm also not a statistician, but their sample size doesn't seem to be all that large, either.

    I may be overanalyzing this, but I'll definitely want to see a LOT more research before I'll write this off as anything other than another group of scientists claiming a magic bullet.

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    1. Re:Whoah... Flair for the dramatic... by myc · · Score: 4, Informative

      I am not a cardiovacular research, but my wife is. excessive growth of the heart is the least of your worries. Adult cardiomyocytes are nortoriously hard to get to proliferate. Getting them to growth at all, even just a little bit, is a big deal.

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  2. Re:Is there an English translation? by XPulga · · Score: 4, Informative

    They are experimenting with the injection of nanofibers that react with the heart tissue to make it more resilient after infarction (heart attack). In particular, they show that a particular kind of nanofiber leads to the desired results, while the other similar kind of nanofiber doesn't. It is a perfectly valid research work that identifies a factor that could be used in humans both for prevention and treatment of heart attacks, but it's not the first research like this and if the ZD guy who posted it thinks it's the closest we've got to Fantastic Voyage, he's got a huge stack of medical books and papers to read.

  3. Nano's Not Fantastic, It's Borg ... by rewinn · · Score: 4, Informative

    ... the better SF reference is not to "Fantastic Voyage", for that movie used mAcrotech made tiny, without any changes allowing for different effects of nano-scale. The atomic-powered minisub was a normal atomic-powered minisub, the two-handed surgical laser was a normal two-handed surgical laser, and the madatory busty female was a normal mandatory busty female. They were simply rendered smaller, that's all.

    In contrast, Borg nano-technology takes full advantage of the unique properties of objects in small scale, just as does the self-assembling peptide nanofibers referenced in the announcement.

    We wouldn't want our SF references to be unrealistic, would we?

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  4. Re:Is there an English translation? by tayhimself · · Score: 2, Informative

    I read the paper and the nanofibres are not actually the effector but merely a carrier. The paper shows two main things : - the growth factor has a protectant effect (PDGF-BB is the growth factor) in the heart - nanofibres allow for a longer term dosage (14 days)of the protein growth factor Not sure why this paper is on slashdot, if something truly groundbreaking happens expect a Nature, Science, or PNAS publishing.

  5. Guts of the thing. by tempest69 · · Score: 3, Informative
    Surviving a heart attack still has it's issues. The heart makes some adaptations that make the cells affected less reliant on oxygen. The problem is that those cells become much less efficient. So you have a chunk of the heart that has lost some of it's endurance function in order to be a bit better at not dying the next time you down a big mac. So these nano fibers arent going to fix you on the ER table, but will reduce the amount of cells that are low endurance during recovery.

    The sample size isnt too bad, if you have a good correlation. Cutting open that many mice and giving them heart attacks can take some work. Then you need to let them recover, then you need to "harvest" the mice and examine their hearts.

    Storm

    Scientists, the leading cause of cancer in lab rats.