Aug. 4--Researchers at Tucson's veterans hospital are developing a patch that could one day act as a living bandage helping to heal people's damaged heart muscles.

Dr. Steven Goldman, chief of cardiology for the Southern Arizona VA Health Care System, is leading the research.

"We've been doing work with heart failure for years; we have a specific interest in developing new treatments," Goldman said.

The patch -- which is the intellectual property of San Francisco-based Theregen Inc., a regenerative-medicine company -- is a biodegradable mesh structure covered in living fibroblast cells. Those cells secrete hormonelike growth factors that stimulate other cells to grow, Goldman said.

Researchers put the patch on rats with heart failure to see if it could improve the organ's functions and discovered it works reasonably well right after a heart attack, Goldman said.

"What we're trying to do now is make it work better in rats with chronic heart failure," said Goldman, who also is associated with the University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center.

The funding comes primarily from an annual grant of $135,000 from the VA Merit Review Program of Washington, D.C., Goldman said.

The benefit of this new step in cardiology is important to veterans as well as to the public at large, VA spokesman Pepe Mendoza said.

"It's cutting-edge research that could extend the lives of your loved ones," he said.

Jordan Lancaster, a pre-doctoral fellow who works in Goldman's lab, said they are now working on getting the patch to repopulate the left ventricular wall with new heart cells after an injury. The left ventricle pumps oxygenated blood throughout the body.

The patches are seeded with cardiomyocytes, or heart muscle cells, and then implanted onto the heart. The idea is to get the muscle cells to start communicating with native tissues in a way that allows for rhythmic, synchronized contractions, Lancaster said.

"The main focus is to get new heart muscle cells into the heart because of its lack of ability to repair itself," Lancaster said. With chronic heart failure, which usually occurs after a heart attack, those cells can become like scar tissue, so the idea is to regenerate them, the researchers said.

Still, it's difficult to say when people might benefit from the living, beating bandage, Goldman said.

The patch itself, without the cardiomyocytes, is in Phase 1 of clinical patient trials, Goldman said. Those trials are in patients with coronary artery bypass grafting and patients in end-stage heart failure who have a left ventricular assist device.

The seeded patches -- with the heart muscle cells added -- aren't in the clinical trial phase yet. So far, Goldman said he and his research team are working to see if the patch will work on a live rat. For human use, the patch would require embryonic or human cardiac stem cells, he said.

Goldman said the research has been a community effort with students from the University of Arizona and high schoolers from the BASIS Tucson charter school.

Contact reporter Dale Quinn at 573-4197 or dquinn@azstarnet.com.

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