To date there are no viable clinical therapies to treat myocardial infarction other than heart transplantation, which cannot be implemented on a large scale. The most advanced and promising strategies developed during the last years to meet patient’s demand are cardiac stem cell therapy. Nevertheless, this approach has multiple medical and economic disadvantages:
i) experimental difficulty in obtaining the high number of cells required for cell treatment;
ii) surgical difficulty in administering these cells to damaged heart tissue, which also leads to immunosuppression of the patient, which means all this as a risk for their survival;
iii) biological barriers inherent to the heart - immune system, low proliferative environment - that prevent the administered cells from penetrating the damaged tissue, colonizing it and improving the function of the infarcted heart; and
iv) high cost, to obtain enough mature cardiomyocytes and to perform the surgery that allows their administration in the infarcted tissue.
All these disadvantages mean that, even if these types of therapies are approved by regulatory bodies, they can only be used in some cases, and in those health systems that have the means and experience to carry out this type of intervention. Therefore, a pharmacological strategy appears a more feasible solution than surgical intervention and can be accessible to all patients.
The candidate molecules identified in this project could provide a high-value therapeutic alternative - easy administration, low toxicity / side effects, and high therapeutic activity - for heart attack patients. Furthermore, there is no cardio-regenerative drug on the market, so our clinical candidate would only have to demonstrate efficacy, without the need to compare its therapeutic superiority against other commercialized therapeutic standards. Thus, if expected results are promising in the following phases of the project, our clinical candidate will have high possibilities of both medical and commercial success. We expect the results of this project to have a profound impact on the treatment of cardiovascular diseases as it will lead to new cardiac regenerative strategies able to replace the lost myocardial tissue, thereby reverting the conditions that lead to heart failure. These new strategies will address the urgent need to reduce the ischemia-related heart failure tolls on premature deaths, morbidity and economic burden in our society. Finally, our work will not only bring to the market novel molecules for enhancing heart regeneration in humans but also move the field of regenerative medicine towards refined and more effective solutions.
