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Fantastic Voyage Into the Heart
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."
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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