Biomarker could take us one step closer to successful heart regeneration

Open access research article examines the cardiopoietic index as a tool for assessing repair capability of human-derived stem cells

Stem cell therapy has shown promise in the field of regeneration following heart disease but numerous challenges currently stand in the way. In this free-to-access research article, authors from the Mayo Clinic (MN, USA), OLV Hospital and Celyad BioSciences (both Belgium) investigate 12 human bone marrow stromal cell samples in order to evaluate the cardiopoietic index, a predictor of the cardiac repair capacity of human stem cells. The promising results obtained suggest that the cardiopoietic index may serve as a biomarker to enable stratification of fitness of human-derived stem cells for heart repair. It is hoped these findings may take us one step closer down the long road to successful heart regeneration.

Read the full research article entitled ‘Cardiopoietic index predicts heart repair fitness of patient-derived stem cells’ free at www.futuremedicine.com/doi/abs/10.2217/bmm.15.31