A New Heart from Old Skin

A New Heart from Old Skin

An Israeli team has made medical history with its ability to transform skin stem cells from heart-disease patients into healthy heart tissue.

From Israel 21C By Karin Kloosterman


Be still your beating hearts: Making medical history, scientists from Israel have been able to transform human stem cells from older diseased patients into brand-new, healthy, beating heart tissue. This could mean that heart disease might someday be repaired by using cells from a person’s own body, eliminating the need for risky surgical implants and transplants. Using stem-cell technology, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology researchers from Haifa showed that their lab-produced cardiac muscle cells are also capable of merging into existing heart muscles.

The news is causing a media sensation around the globe.

“The good thing about it is that the research has increased public awareness to science that Israel isn’t only portrayed with hostility, but that it’s a country bringing good news for the world,” Prof. Lior Gepstein, head researcher in the advance, tells ISRAEL21c.

A decade from clinical trials

It will take five to 10 years before this basic science can get to the point of clinical trials, Gepstein emphasizes. People with advanced heart disease today might never benefit from the research, published in the current issue of the European Heart Journal. The advance is more likely to be applicable to people who are now 30 years old and younger.

Still, the breakthrough is monumental.

“What is new and exciting about our research is that we have shown that it’s possible to take skin cells from an elderly patient with advanced heart failure and end up with his own beating cells in a laboratory dish that are healthy and young — the equivalent to the stage of his heart cells when he was just born,” says Gepstein.

Skin cells from patients aged 51 and 61 were transformed into healthy heart muscle cells by adding to the cell nucleus three genes and valpoic acid, a small molecule. Gepstein’s team avoided a transcription factor typically used in creating stem cells because it’s thought to cause cells to develop out of control and become tumors. The new heart muscle cells, cardiomyocytes, grew in a lab dish with existing heart tissues, and within 24 to 48 hours both kinds of tissue were beating together as one. “The tissue was behaving like a tiny microscopic cardiac tissue composed of approximately 1,000 cells in each beating area.” This culture was then implanted into the hearts of healthy rats, where it connected well to the existing cardiac muscle.

An empire of stem-cell research

Over the last decade, Israel has created what Gepstein calls an “empire” in stem-cell research, with nodes of highly focused research taking place at the country’s best research institutes. He focuses on the heart, but there are labs concentrating on diabetes, Parkinson’s disease or on repairing nerve damage.

Israeli scientists today use pluripotent stem cells, which come from skin or blood samples. Cultivating stem cells this way circumvents ethical considerations of embryonic stem-cell research, and also guarantees that patients wouldn’t need to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives, since the progenitor cells originate from the patients’ own bodies.

The early pioneering work, such as that of Benjamin Rubinoff at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem, was done with embryonic stem cells. Of the world’s first 10 scientific papers dealing with human embryonic stem cells, nearly all were authored in Israel.

Gepstein explains that Israel never faced the ethical challenges in embryonic stem-cell research that plague most US states. That’s because in Jewish law, an embryo is not considered human until 40 days after conception. Using younger embryos therefore doesn’t raise ethical problems, and Israel was free to move ahead in the field. Today, Israelis excel at maintaining pluripotent stem-cell cultures, growing them and coaxing them into new cell types, Gepstein says.

Turning Sound into Sight for the Blind

Turning sound into sight for the blind

Israeli brain scientists have developed special devices to activate the visual cortex with data coming in from existing senses.
By Abigail Klein Leichman June 12, 2012, 
From Israel 21C

People born blind can be trained to visualize objects using sensory substitution devices (SSDs) developed by scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences and the Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada. SSDs are non-invasive devices that provide visual information to the blind through their existing senses. For example, a visual-to-auditory SSD converts images from a miniature video camera into “soundscapes” that activate the visual cortex of the blind person, who listens through stereo headphones hooked up to a laptop or smartphone. Individuals trained in the laboratory of Dr. Amir Amedi can use SSDs to identify complex everyday objects, locate people and read letters and words.
After the SSD training period, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the organization of the visual cortex in the brains of the test subjects. The results were published several months ago in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

Seeing without eyesight

Previous studies already revealed that visual processing happens in two parallel pathways of the brain. The ventral stream, or the “what” pathway, apparently takes care of processing form, object identity and color. The dorsal stream is considered the “where/how” pathway, allowing a person to analyze visual and spatial information. Amedi’s PhD student Ella Striem-Amit wanted to learn more about the role of visual experience in shaping this functional architecture of the brain. She theorized that maybe eyesight isn’t necessary in order for the dual processing mechanism to kick in. Various kinds of SSDs developed in Amedi’s lab allowed her to test her theory. One of the devices is a tiny virtual cane, a patented invention whose sensors help blind people estimate the distance between themselves and the object at which the cane is pointing. The virtual cane emits a focused beam towards surrounding objects, and transmits the information to the user via a gentle vibration. This allows users to identify obstacles of different heights and to create a spatial mental picture to help them navigate between the objects. “The use of the device is intuitive and can be learned within a few minutes of use,” said Amedi. Using fMRI following sensory substitution, the Hebrew University researchers discovered that the visual cortex’s two-pathway division of labor was indeed activated by sounds that convey the visual information. Striem-Amit was correct: The complex system isn’t dependent on eyesight.

The brain is a ‘task machine’

Amedi’s team and other research groups have suggested that many areas of the brain find ways to accomplish tasks regardless of the format of the information coming in.
“The brain is not a sensory machine, although it often looks like one,” said Amedi. “It is a task machine.”
This newest study further supports such a notion, and shows that the brain of a congenitally blind person could be trained to process visual information with the aid of visual rehabilitation devices – including, perhaps, an SSD hybrid prosthesis.“The exciting view of our brain as highly flexible task-based and not sensory-based raises the chances for visual rehabilitation, long considered unachievable, given adequate training in teaching the brain how to see,” summarized Amedi’s students Lior Reich and Shachar Maidenbaum in Current Opinion in Neurology. In the future, SSDs could not only help scientists assess the brain’s functional organization, but could also serve as aids for the blind in daily visual tasks. The devices could even be used to visually train the brain prior to eye surgery, and to augment vision after the surgery.