Michael Jones, known to friends as Mike, had suffered from congestive heart failure due to multiple blocked arteries. As a result, he had permanent scarring of his heart muscle. On March 23, the 66-year-old had coronary artery bypass surgery at Jewish Hospital. During the procedure, his physicians took tissue from a portion of the upper chamber of his heart, which was sent to Piero Anversa of Harvard University and Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston, where his cardiac stem cells were retrieved and grown.

 This past July 17, Mike became the world's first recipient of an adult cardiac stem cell infusion procedure, from which he continues to recover. During the procedure, his own cardiac stem cells were injected into the heart scar tissue using a minimally invasive catheterization procedure, in which a catheter was fed through a leg artery into his heart. The procedure was performed at Jewish Hospital by Sohail Ikram, M.D., University of Louisville Professor of Medicine and Director and Chief of Invasive and Interventional Cardiology.

 Jones' procedure was part of the world' s first phase one FDA-approved clinical trial using adult cardiac stem cells to treat disease. The clinical trial is being conducted by a team of University of Louisville physicians at Jewish Hospital. Study leader Roberto Bolli, Jewish Hospital Heart and Lung Institute Chair in Cardiology and Director of the University of Louisville's Institute for Molecular Cardiology, says: "We continue to enroll patients in this first-of-its-kind clinical trial. We hope to help the heart regenerate its own tissue and improve heart function." Bolli is participating in the clinical trial with several other leaders in the field of cardiovascular and stem cell medicine. Additional patients have enrolled in the clinical trial, all of whom will receive the cardiac stem cell therapy.

 Dr. Bolli noted that another facility in California is conducting a similar stem cell clinical trial. "The difference between what we have done and what another institute nationally has done is that we have injected a pure population of stem cells, the c-kit-positive cells. The other institution injected cardiosphere-derived cells, which are a mixture of primitive and partially differentiated cells, complicating the recognition of the actual therapeutic cell. Our study involves a specific, well-characterized population of undifferentiated cells: the c-kit-positive cardiac stem cells are self-renewing, clonogenic and multipotent, which are the fundamental properties of stem cells," he explains.

News Release: World's First Cardiac Adult Stem Cell Patient Receives Infusion  www.medicalnewstoday.com  July 25, 2009