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Cardiac biology

A protein for healing infarcted hearts

Nature volume 525, pages 461–462 (2015)Cite this article

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Human heart tissue has minimal ability to regenerate following injury. But the protein Fstl1, which is normally expressed in the heart's epicardial region, has now been shown to induce regeneration following heart attack. See Article p.479

Healthy mammalian heart tissue has a measurable but limited ability to regenerate1. Over a normal human lifespan, around 45% of heart-muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) are renewed, with the remaining 55% persisting from birth. This rate is not sufficient to repair the injury caused by myocardial infarction, or heart attack as it is commonly known. Instead, the infarcted area becomes populated by fibroblast cells, which form a non-contractile collagenous scar — a quick fix that progressively decreases the heart's pumping capacity. Any regenerative therapy must thus provide an influx of cells that can properly heal the muscle, either from an external source or from the body itself2. A major effort3,4 is going into the potential use of immature cardiomyocytes derived from human stem cells for such regeneration. But in this issue, Wei et al.5 (page 479) take a different approach, making use of a protein that is present in the epicardial region of a healthy heart but lost following heart infarction.

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Figure 1: Patched up to heal.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic is in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Medicine, Columbia University, New York, New York 10032, USA.,

    Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic

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  1. Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic
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Correspondence to Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic.

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Vunjak-Novakovic, G. A protein for healing infarcted hearts. Nature 525, 461–462 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15217

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