Two widely used antibiotics may be able to regenerate heart cells in pigs, suggesting they might one day be used to treat heart failure.
Heart failure occurs when the heart is unable to pump enough blood to meet the body鈥檚 needs. It commonly develops after heart attacks, which permanently damage and weaken cardiac muscle. Other than an artificial heart or a heart transplant, treatments for the condition can only slow its progression, not repair damaged tissue.
So, at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and his colleagues assessed whether currently available drugs might actually regenerate heart cells. They used drug discovery software to screen all medications approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for the ability to bind to two proteins 鈥� Meis1 and Hoxb13 鈥� which previous research has indicated prevent heart muscle cells from dividing and regenerating.
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The team identified nine drugs with potential activity against the proteins. Further experiments showed that two of them 鈥� paromomycin and neomycin 鈥� spurred heart muscle cells from rats to divide in a dish. Both of these medications are widely used antibiotics. Paromomycin is approved to treat parasitic infections in the stomach and intestines, while neomycin prevents and treats minor wound infections.
The researchers then administered an intravenous infusion of both drugs to seven pigs with damaged hearts. An equal number of animals with cardiac damage received infusions without the antibiotics. After five weeks of daily treatments, the researchers measured scar tissue in the pigs鈥� hearts and the hearts鈥� ability to pump blood.
On average, treated pigs鈥� hearts had roughly half the amount of scar tissue as those from untreated animals and were better at pumping blood. Further analysis revealed that, compared with the those of untreated pigs, the hearts of the treated pigs had a roughly 25-fold increase in a biological marker of cell division. Together, these findings suggest that the antibiotic combination regenerates heart cells, says Sadek.
However, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City says these findings don鈥檛 necessarily point to regeneration. 鈥淸It] could be that these drugs are just sort of protecting the heart better,鈥� she says. Had the researchers captured a video of the heart cells dividing, they would have definitively shown regeneration, says Chaudhry.
鈥淭here鈥檚 no way to look at cells dividing by video [in living animals],鈥� says Sadek. 鈥淎nd the high bar is for you to determine this in [animals], not in [cultured cells].鈥�
Nature Cardiovascular Research
