Cancer immunotherapy may help treat heart disease

CAR-T cell therapy is a rapidly emerging immunotherapy that uses the patient's own cells to treat certain types of cancer, and for another life-threatening disease, heart disease, it may be a viable treatment option. The cancer immunotherapy may be used to treat certain heart damage, according to a validation study based on mice published recently in Nature. Studies have shown that CAR-T cells, which target immune cells, restore heart function in heart-damaged model mice. More research is needed on whether this approach can achieve clinical transformation.
"using patients' own cells to fight cancer has been the most promising breakthrough, and we hope to use this technology to treat other common diseases." "While more research is needed before we can introduce this approach to the clinic, it marks an important step forward in the treatment of a disease that accelerates the development of heart failure and has the potential to reverse it," said Jonathan A. Epstein, co-author of the study and professor of cardiovascular studies at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. "
fibrosis is caused by excess myocardial fibroblasts, which are active in the time of injury and cause the heart to harden and affect heart function. This is common in most heart diseases, but there are few treatments that can improve symptoms, and no treatment is known to directly target excessive myocardial fibrosis.
have had some successful cases of cancer treatment, such as the use of engineered modified T-cells to identify and destroy cancer cells. Epstein and colleagues investigated whether a similar approach applied to myocardial fibrosis. The researchers identified a candidate target protein in the active cardiomyoblast cells of the patient's heart, and conducted experiments in mice with heart damage and fibrosis models, and found that by transforming CAR-T cells to recognize the protein, it was available to reduce cardiomyocardial fibrosis and enhance heart function in mice.
-T immunotherapy has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat certain types of cancer. Study lead author Haig Aghajanian, Ph.D., of Epstein Labs, said more needs to be done to minimize safety risks and determine whether the protein identified by the study is the best treatment target before it can be considered for treatment of human heart disease. (Source: Lu Yi, China Science Journal)
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