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#Drug flips cells to limit damage after heart attack University of North carolina at Chapel hill rightoriginal Studyposted by Mark Derewicz-UNC on October 16 2014a new way to generate more blood vessels after a heart attack can reduce damage and speed healing tests with mice show. Cells called fibroblasts which cause scar tissue to form can be turned into endothelial cells which generate blood vessels to supply oxygen and nutrients to the injured regions of the heart. This switch is driven by p53 the well-documented tumor-suppressing protein. Researchers showed that increasing the level of p53 in scar-forming cells significantly reduced scarring and improved heart function after heart attack. The finding published in the journal Nature shows that it is possible to limit the damage wrought by heart attacks which strike nearly one million people in the United states each year. Heart disease accounts for one in four deaths every year.####Scientists have thought that fibroblasts are differentiated terminally meaning they can t adopt the fate of other kinds of cells; but our study suggests this may not be entirely true##says Eric Ubil a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North carolina at Chapel hill and first author of the study.####It appears that injury itself can induce fibroblasts to change into endothelial cells so the heart heals better. We found a drug that could push this process forward making even more endothelial cells that help form blood vessels.####The results were truly amazing in mice and it will be exciting to see if people respond in the same way.####After a heart attack fibroblasts replace damaged heart muscle with scar tissue. This scarring can harden the walls of the heart and lessen its ability to pump blood throughout the body. Meanwhile endothelial cells create new blood vessels to improve circulation to the damaged area. However sometimes these endothelial cells naturally turn into fibroblasts instead adding to the scarring. Ubil and his colleagues wondered if the switch ever flipped the other wayâ##could fibroblasts turn into endothelial cells. To explore this idea they induced heart attacks in mice and then studied the fibroblasts to see if the cells expressed markers characteristic of endothelial cells. To their surprise almost a third of the fibroblasts in the area of the cardiac injury expressed these endothelial markers. The researchers found that the endothelial cells generated from fibroblasts actually gave rise to functioning blood vessels. Next Ubil and colleagues wanted to identify the molecule that triggered the switch. Because a heart attack is such a stressful event Ubil created a list of genes that were known to be involved in cellular responses to stress. Topping the list was p53 a protein often called the##guardian of the genome ##because it causes damaged out of control cells to commit suicide or apoptosis which reduces the likelihood that they will go on to form tumors.####As luck would have it that was the first gene I tried and that was the last gene I tried##says Ubil who conducted the research as a graduate student in the laboratory of former UNC faculty member and senior study author Arjun Deb. Ubil found that p53 was##turned on ##or overexpressed in the fibroblasts after heart injury and this seemed to regulate fibroblasts becoming endothelial cells. He and colleagues figured that if the p53 protein was responsible for the positive switch then blocking it in mice would halt the transition from scar-forming cells to blood vessel-forming cells. Their experiments revealed that knocking out the p53 gene in scar-forming cells in adult mice decreased the number of cells making the switch by 50 percent. Likewise the researchers rationalized that upping the level of p53 would increase the number of fibroblasts that would turn into endothelial cells. Because p53 is mutated often or lost in cancer cells a number of compounds have been designed to increase its levels as a possible anticancer treatment. The researchers picked one such experimental drug called RITA and used it to treat mice for a few days after cardiac injury. The drug had dramatic results doubling the number of fibroblasts that turned into endothelial cells. That is instead of just 30 percent of fibroblasts naturally switching into endothelial cells 60 percent made the switch.####The treated mice benefited tremendously##Ubil says.####There was such a huge decrease in scar formation. We checked the mice periodically from three days to fourteen days after treatment. They had more blood vessels at the site of injury and their heart function was better.####By increasing the number of blood vessels in the injury region we were able to greatly reduce the effects of the heart attack.####Ubil says his study shows that this could be a novel strategy for treating heart attacks. However he cautions that any treatments based on the discovery outlined in Nature are many years away.####But our work shows it s possible to change the fate of scar-forming cells in the heart and this could potentially benefit people who have heart attacks.####Deb adds:####We are also currently investigating whether such an approach could be applied for treating scarring in other organs after injury.####The American Heart Association and the National institutes of health funded the work. Source: UNC-Chapel Hillyou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license h

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