Researchers Discover Protein That Reverses Heart Disease In Older Mice

 Regenerative Medicine  

Harvard Stem Cell Institute's Richard Lee and Amy Wagers have identified of a protein that rejuvenates old, failing hearts in mice -- and may prove to be a treatment for the leading form of heart failure in elderly humans.

Reseaerchers at Harvard University think they have found a way to potentially reverse the aging process in human organs.

Dr. Richard Lee, director of regenerative medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Amy Wagers, of the Department of Regenerative Biology at Harvard, made the discovery when they were working with younger and older mice.

They took an older mouse with the most common form of human heart failure and merged the mouse’s blood stream with that of a healthy young mouse using a Siamese twin technique known as parabiosis. They found that the older mouse’s diseased heart was able to reverse to a younger healthier condition.

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The implications for the treatment of diastolic heart failure ultimately may rewrite our understanding of aging.

A report on Lee and Wagers’ findings was published by the journal Cell.

“The most common form of heart failure [in the elderly] is actually a form that’s not caused by heart attacks but is very much related to the heart aging,” said Lee, who, like Wagers, is a principal faculty member at HSCI.

“In this study, we were able to show that a protein that circulates in the blood is related to this aging process, and if we gave older mice this protein, we could reverse the heart aging in a very short period of time,” Lee said. “We are very excited about it because it opens a new window on the most common form of heart failure.”

“After about 2½ years we were convinced, and said, ‘We really have to identify this factor.’ It took about six months to find something, and another year to be convinced that it was real,” Lee said. “We looked at lipids; we looked at metabolites. Then we set up a collaboration with a startup company in Colorado, called SomaLogic, that had an interesting technology for analyzing factors in blood. And by working closely with SomaLogic, we found the likely factor.”

What the researchers found was that at least one of the factors causing the rejuvenation of the hearts was GDF-11, “a member of a very important family of proteins called TGF-beta proteins, for transforming growth factor. There are around 35 members of the family,” Lee said. “Some have been very well studied, and this is one that is relatively obscure.”





SOURCE  Harvard University, Reuters

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