Researchers in Japan may have found a way to repair cardiac damage in patients suffering from chronic heart attack and heart failure by reprogramming cardiac fibroblasts (CFs) to cardiomyocytes (CMs) in a mouse model of chronic myocardial infarction (MI). Published online Dec. 12, 2022, in Circulation, the study showed that by tweaking the expression of a few key genes, researchers could reverse the lasting damage caused by heart attacks.
A study led by scientists at Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney, Australia, has shown that the transcription factor hypoxia-inducible factor 1 (HIF-1) suppresses harmful reactive oxygen species (ROS)-induced growth of cardiac fibroblasts (CFs) and fibrotic scarring after myocardial infarction (MI) in knockout (KO) mice.