Cardiac stem cell research: An elephant in the room?

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Abstract

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the industrialized world, and stem cell therapy seems to be a promising treatment for injured cardiac tissue. To reach this goal, the scientific community needs to find a good source of stem cells that can be used to obtain new myocardium in a very period range of time. Since there are many ethical and technical problems with using embryonic stem cells as a source of cells with cardiogenic potential, many laboratories have attempted to isolate potential cardiac stem cells from several tissues. The best candidates seem to be cardiac "progenitor" and/or "stem" cells, which can be isolated from subendocardial biopsies from the same patient or from embryonic and/or fetal myocardium. Regardless of the technique used to isolate and characterize these cells, it appears that the different cells isolated from adult myocardium to date are all phenotypic variations of a unique cell type that expresses several markers, such as c-Kit, CD34, MDR-1, Sca-1, CD45, nestin, or Isl-1, in various combinations. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

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Di Felice, V., De Luca, A., Colorito, M. L., Montalbano, A., Ardizzone, N. M., Macaluso, F., … Zummo, G. (2009). Cardiac stem cell research: An elephant in the room? Anatomical Record, 292(3), 449–454. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.20858

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