Are you or a loved one interested in receiving stem cell treatment? For free information, please fill out our treatment form or email me don@repairstemcells.org and just put TREATMENT in the subject box and the MEDICAL CONDITION in the message.

The following story about stem cell therapy for heart disease isn't exactly earth shattering news.  In fact, regular readers of this blog and those knowledgeable about stem cells may be bored by this.  However, that is one of the goals of this blog-  I want stem cell treatment stories like this to be so commonplace that watching paint dry will be more interesting than reading stories like these.

Alas, we are far from that point.  This story focuses on an Alabama heart disease patient getting treated with his own adult stem cells.  The goal of the stem cell therapy for the heart is to induce angiogenesis- induce the body to create new blood vessels thus increasing the blood flow and also helping the heart function.

I wish David Smith the best of health with this stem cell treatment.  David, I think you picked the right path and you are one of the pioneers of adult stem cell treatment.  I wish you all the best and I hope if there is a heart patient out there reading this-  there is hope for you still.  Send me an email or call me and I will try to point you in the right direction. -DM

Princeton Baptist becomes first hospital in Alabama to inject stem cells into a patient's heart

Use of patient's own stem cells to fix tissue tried in Alabama

Friday, March 07, 2008ANNA VELASCO

News staff writer

At age 47, David Smith was out of options.

The north Alabama man has severe coronary artery disease and has exhausted traditional therapies. Despite medicine, two bypass surgeries and a stent, Smith has severe daily chest pain and is just waiting for another heart attack.

That's why Smith, of Eva, underwent experimental treatment Wednesday. An interventional cardiologist at Princeton Baptist Medical Center injected Smith's adult stem cells (or, possibly, a placebo) into the patient's heart with the hope of stimulating the growth of new blood vessels to restore adequate blood supply and improve the heart's pumping.

Dr. Farrell Mendelsohn of Cardiology PC, injected stem cells into the heart of his first patient in the clinical trial at the end of January, a first for a hospital in Alabama. Smith was his third and final patient participating in the study, which has enrolled 165 people nationwide at 24 sites.

"What we're really trying to do is trick the body into building its own bypass in people who can't get a bypass or stent," Mendelsohn said.

The last patient of the study nationwide will undergo treatment next week, and it will be more than a year before results are known.

Princeton Baptist and Mendelsohn have spent 18 months preparing for the trial. The hospital invested $200,000 in technology needed for the treatment. Mendelsohn screened trial participants, who then had to be approved by an outside review board of physicians who agreed the patients had no other options.

Because the treatment is part of a trial, one in three patients gets placebo instead of stem cell injections. Two of three participants get their own stem cells, either in a high or low dose.

Neither Smith nor Mendelsohn will know for a year whether Smith got stem cells or placebo. It was a chance Smith was willing to take. He wants to further the research for his 16-year-old, even if not for himself.

"I've got a son, and most likely he's got the disease," said Smith, whose father died from heart disease at 45. "I'll do anything that can help him."

Mapping the heart:

The blood stem cells needed for this trial stay primarily in bone marrow. To coax them out into the bloodstream in large numbers, Smith got injections of a specific protein five days in a row. On Tuesday he had apheresis, a process that collected the increased number of white cells, including the stem cells.

The cells were then taken to the stem cell processing lab at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Scientists in the lab used a machine Wednesday that separated from all the cells the exact stem cells needed - blood stem cells that mature into the building blocks for new blood vessels.

Baxter Healthcare, maker of the stem cell selection machine, has underwritten the cost of the trial with the hope that the equipment will get federal approval for use in this type of cardiac treatment. The device has been approved for cancer care for a decade.

The stem cells were delivered to Princeton in a cooler, and Smith went into the catheterization lab Wednesday afternoon. In the more than two-hour procedure, Mendelsohn first worked a catheter up from Smith's leg to his heart to map where he wanted to inject the stem cells. By touching many areas of the heart with the catheter, Mendelsohn mapped which tissue was dead, which tissue was healthy and which tissue was salvageable but not pumping because of lack of blood flow.

Once he had pinpointed the 10 best places to inject the stem cells, Mendelsohn worked into the heart a different catheter that had an injection tip. He delivered the doses to the tissue that was still alive but needed blood flow.

Various therapies:

Although study participants won't know for many months if the study was successful, patients could start feeling better sooner. Animal studies have shown new blood vessel growth in 12 weeks after stem cell injections, Mendelsohn said.

The current stem cell trial is finishing its second phase. If results warrant it, a third and final phase could begin a year.

The trial is the 20th that Mendelsohn has participated in investigating different ways to promote angiogenesis, the body's development of new blood vessels. He has done cardiac and vascular studies using growth factors and gene therapy and now stem cells.

Even studies that were not successes have been helpful in understanding how to help the body repair itself, said Mendelsohn, a Birmingham native who got his medical degree at Johns Hopkins University.

"This cascade of events for rebuilding blood vessels is very complicated," he said.

Patient's best shot:

This is Smith's third study as a participant. Some days he's too weak to walk to the mailbox. He has been retired from his job as a forklift operator at a Chrysler plant in Huntsville since 2001 and can't fully enjoy time with his son.

Mendelsohn thinks the stem cell trial is Smith's best shot at a better life.

"This is one of the most promising therapies available anywhere for that desperate patient population," Mendelsohn said.