Gene Therapy Improves Heart Muscle Function to Compensate for Heart Failure

This study featured two independent experiments. The first established the safety of administering a therapeutic gene delivery vector, BNP116, created from an inactivated virus over three months, into 48 pigs without heart failure through the coronary arteries via catheterization using echocardiography. The second experiment examined the efficacy of the treatment in 13 pigs with severe heart failure induced by mitral regurgitation. Six pigs received the gene and 7 received a saline solution. The researchers determined that the gene therapy was safe and significantly reversed heart failure by 25 percent in the left ventricle and by 20 percent in the left atrium. Heart failure often results in enlarged hearts, and the team found a 10 percent reduction of heart size in the affected animals. Heart failure in the cohort of pigs treated with saline worsened. The research team plans to study the same gene therapy in a human trial starting next year. Protein Phosphatase Inhibitor-1 Gene Therapy in a Swine Model of Nonischemic Heart Failure Increased protein phosphatase-1 in heart failure (HF) induces molecular changes deleterious to the cardiac cell. Inhibiting protein phosphatase-1 through the overexpression of a constitutively active inhibitor-1 (I-1c) has been shown to reverse cardiac dysfunction in a model of ischemic HF. This study sought to determine the therapeutic efficacy of a re-engineered adeno-associated viral vector carrying I-1c (BNP116.I-1c) in...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs