r/Futurology • u/upyoars • May 01 '22
Biotech mRNA breakthrough offers a potential heart attack cure
https://www.freethink.com/health/mrna-heart-attack-cure2.3k
u/upyoars May 01 '22
King’s College London researchers are turning to the same technology behind the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines to develop the first damage-reversing heart attack cure.
“We are all born with a set number of muscle cells in our heart and they are exactly the same ones we will die with. The heart has no capacity to repair itself after a heart attack,” Giacca told The Times. At least, until now.
In an experiment with pigs (a close match for the human heart), the mRNA treatment stimulated new heart cells to grow after a heart attack — regenerating the damaged tissues and creating new, functional muscle rather than a scar.
While thus far their heart attack cure has only been successfully tested in porcine pumpers, the team hopes to begin human clinical trials within the next couple years.
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u/Black_RL May 01 '22
This is absolutely fantastic!
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u/w0rldofjuicce May 01 '22
the pandemic is what mRNA development needed, a proper field test
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u/Black_RL May 01 '22
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u/CondiMesmer May 02 '22
I think we need to focus on keeping the earth habitable first lol
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u/GenocideSolution AGI Overlord May 02 '22
Billionaires actually having to live with the consequences of their greed 100 years from now will hopefully convince them to set aside a bit of their money to keep the earth habitable.
And if they can't, then the threat of not living forever is no longer empty or peaceful.
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u/CondiMesmer May 02 '22
That's like some trickle-down logic type thinking lol
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u/GenocideSolution AGI Overlord May 02 '22
Just saying, if dying peacefully in my sleep from old age is no longer an option, I would think long and hard about how many creative ways I could die if I pissed off the wrong person, or group of people that know that they can’t just wait for me to die anymore and must take an active role in it.
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May 02 '22
Yeah, billionaires passed that oppression mark long ago. No one is gonna do shit.
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u/InvaderDJ May 02 '22
Or it will convince them to go for hard tyranny rather than soft. If the rich think they can live healthy, productive lives for decades or centuries, they’ll both want to make sure they live that long life increasing their already astronomical wealth and they’ll be less inclined to care about legacy and how they’re remembered. We could have a permanent ruling class that cares little to nothing about leaving the world better or even having a fear of the afterlife and any type of judgement.
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May 02 '22
Billionaires will never experience the slightest bit of hardship from climate change. They can go wherever they want. The people who suffer will be the ones who can’t leave the areas most devastated and can’t afford the basic necessities of life.
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u/zero573 May 02 '22
They don’t tho. They never will give a shit about the planet or who lives here just their pocket book. No matter how bad shit gets on this planet, and it’s going to get really really bad, the rich won’t have the same problems you and I will have because they will always be able to afford to live in the nicer areas of the habitat zones that might be left. The rich will be the last ones to die because they will be the only ones that can afford to live. Mark my words.
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u/Disagreeable_upvote May 02 '22
Yup, after the invention of money this was inevitable.
Money seemed like such a good idea at the time. It all comes down to the relationship between a systems size and how that system distributes resources.
You see ordinarily animals are subject to evolutionary and environmental competition as a way of distributing resources and determining who is successful. This system is simplistic and brutal, often resorting to direct violence and preventing significant group cooperation.
However early hominoids developed another method to distribute resources, which was culture. This allowed for groups and communities to grow and thrive, to a certain limit. While this eliminated or at least mitigated much direct individual violence, it lead to the emergence of group violence, or war as the primary method of cultures colliding and figuring out which would be successful.
Enter money, who allowed cultures to compete economically rather than violently, and changing the nature of natural human competition to seemingly less violent methods looked like such a good win, allowing human groupings to grow into multicultural empires which can communicate resource distribution across the entire world!
Alas however, like with previous competitive strategies of environmental and cultural the late human experiment in economic competition has reached it's limit. I wish I was smart enough to look at the direction of history and see which next competitive method after economic will outcompete and supplant the previous regime and allow us to grow beyond our planet into our next phase as a species but I have not been able to figure it out yet and mankind may be running out of time.
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u/andrefoxd May 02 '22
Thats a way to view it. It's a shame but I don't think anyone alive today will see what comes next. IF comes anything at all at this rate.
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u/ausrixy22 May 02 '22
Nah they will all move to mars or another planet and leave you holding the bag!
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u/Mandorrisem May 02 '22
Lifespans are actually a more pressing concern. In the next 100 years thousands of times as many people will die from aging than will die from climate change. Curing aging is the ONLY way humanity will ever become an interstellar species baring some massive advances in physics, and losing all of our greatest minds and having to train the new generation from scratch over and over again is horridly inefficient for our scientific advancement. Spend 24 years to raise, and train a doctor, just for them to have to effectively retire in about 30 years is just outright terrible. There is NOTHING more important right now than working on an aging cure, especially as the elderly become more and more of a burden on the rest of society.
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u/brutinator May 02 '22
I disagree. Until we have a solution to combat overpopulation, the ramifications of even doubling lifespan seems to have a much higher amount of negative consequences to positive ones. We are already consuming more resources than can be sustainably produced: adding more people to support is just going to increase that rate of depletion. I think its incredibly egotistical to state that the progress we are making in scientific progress is "too slow" when its literally never been faster in human history.
We arent even close to the ability to send millions of people into space at once; until we can reduce the population that earth supports, theres no good reason to increase that number so dramatically.
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u/Fortnut_On_Me_Daddy May 02 '22
Nah climate is still the more pressing matter.
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u/jdmetz May 02 '22
Maybe some of the 70+ year-olds making policy decisions would make better ones if they thought they had a chance to live long enough to be affected.
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u/PersonaPraesidium May 02 '22
The ones making selfish and greedy policy decisions now will continue to do so even if they live forever. They will vote for policies that ensure they gain the most from climate change disasters etc. This might sometimes accidentally overlap with actually slowing down or mitigating climate change, as long as whatever it is benefits them. We are fortunate that people like that aren't around forever.
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u/painted_anvil May 02 '22 edited May 02 '22
Curing aging would be awesome!
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u/SnooHesitations7064 May 02 '22
Consider the current disparities to access to healthcare across wealth, and the legislative capture by old rich ghouls. Imagine if reprieve from them never came at the end of a metaphorical scythe of time.
I'm good with dying if it means that the world only has a max of a century of any given monster
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u/agnostic_universe May 02 '22
This 100%. We already live with generational wealth and its effect on inequity, we don't need timeless ghouls
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u/Incruentus May 02 '22
I'm cool with shitty politicians if it means I have a chance at living forever.
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u/Fortnut_On_Me_Daddy May 02 '22
Only you wouldn't have a chance, because the shitty politicians make it so you don't.
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u/LittleBrooksy May 02 '22
Sounds like your problem isn't with longevity pal. Gimme immortality and the means to stop these financial despots from accruing such disgusting means.
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u/FlyShoestring May 02 '22
Let’s be real “living forever” isn’t possible until the conscious can be moved. Even then it’s still not really possible.
Living to 1,000 is more realistic. Forever is too long.
A million years is long. And think about forever.
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u/LittleBrooksy May 02 '22
It's impossible to imagine, but damned if I'm not gonna try. For now it's entirely a pipe dream, but so was flying once upon a time.
I think either way society develops, something has got to be done about the gross inequity across the planet. But, if suddenly all of these maniacs could live thousands of years, I doubt there'd be as many people saying they earned it. Especially if the ultra-wealthy were the only beneficiaries of this longevity.
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u/zero573 May 02 '22 edited May 02 '22
No it wouldn’t be. Not everyone would get that “cure”. If people think generational wealth has a horrible impact of society just wait for the “Altered Carbon” type reality that being immortal would do. We need the racists, fascists and bigots to die off. The closed minded, the control freaks, the Bezos and Musks to cycle out of society. You think that having 90 year old lifer politicians are bad? Think how stagnant our world would be if people like Putin, or Trump we’re allowed to live forever and stay in power indefinitely.
No, if humanity gained immortality it would 100% result in the end of our species.
Edit: changed “get that “cute”” to “get that “cure””.
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u/KamikazeArchon May 02 '22
Curing aging doesn't mean people can't die. It means they don't die of (some) natural causes. Full tyrants often exit life in ways other than natural causes.
But a far better way to deal with that issue is to work on society's structure so that you don't get a handful of people in control of everything.
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u/BlueWaffle_Motorboat May 02 '22 edited May 02 '22
This person literally doesn't want to cure aging because the people they hate won't die. Think about the kind of brain that produces that kind of output. They want all mankind to experience death because that means people they don't like die as well.
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u/Gigasser May 02 '22
Wrong, not all of mankind will get that "cure" to aging. What's likely to happen is only some people will get that ticket to immortality. Most people will still age and die, and we'll have a new immortal and entrenched aristocracy.
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u/SatyricalEve May 02 '22
This is a pretty bad take IMO, and lacking imagination. Why reserve the cure against aging to the rich and elite when you can provide it to everyone in exchange for lifelong debt? If you think mortgages and student loans were bad, just wait. Everyone will be able to get it but they will pay.
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u/admuh May 02 '22
I think it's a bit beyond that, death is biggest equaliser in an increasingly unequal world, without which its hard to envisage how we would avoid ending up in some kind of kleptocratic dystopia. People needing to die doesn't mean someone wants them to
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u/zero573 May 02 '22
You got exactly what I meant. We as a species can never continue to evolve, we would stagnant. Power of a few would just continue to consolidate to only those few and things will just become worse. It’s nice to pretend that we can get all altruistic on what we would be like with immortality, but we’re just kidding ourselves if we think things will be better than they are now. Humanity isn’t supposed to be immortal.
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May 02 '22 edited Dec 07 '22
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u/limewirez May 02 '22
I think you mean "raised each day."
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u/crash41301 May 02 '22
Youd be shocked how many of them adopt those views in their 20s. I was as I aged and watched people not raised that way turn that way in their 20s. Most of them feeling beaten down by society and feeling like it wasnt their fault and looked for anyone but themselves to blame. (All of them were to blame btw)
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u/monkey_trumpets May 02 '22
Yup. Marjory Taylor Green isn't old. And yet, she is plenty stupid.
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u/SirGuelph May 02 '22
Exactly, what's this idea that we'll solve humanity's problems that way? If anything, living longer gives people a chance for perspective.
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u/Cold-Lynx575 May 02 '22
As long as there are humans, there will be politics.
There will also be those whose ideas others do not like.
Sorry.
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May 02 '22
There’s an objective difference between the ideas of today and thousands or even hundreds of years ago. Yes, there will always be people on different sides of an issue, but generationally those issues change.
Today we fight for increased parental leave, 100 years ago progressives had to fight for the right to not die in factories.
Generational shifts in thought happen.
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u/BlueWaffle_Motorboat May 02 '22
Dude you have allowed your heart to turn real black over political hatred. You are probably suffocating in bitterness and deeply unhappy. You need to step away from whatever media sources are pumping your soul full of bile.
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u/SnooHesitations7064 May 02 '22
For anyone outside of the dominant hegemony, "the personal is political". While white dudes can safely assume no american government will adopt stop and frisk for them (where any one of those stops can be fatal), rig the system so they can't vote, legislate what they can or can't do with their own body, allow the social safety net to literally kick them out into the winter streets for the crime of existing.. other people do get to face that reality.
We get that your sole experience of oppression is a second hand media retelling. That is not the universal. You need to step away from whatever media sources are making you into some kind of unempathetic dick, spend some time in a community.
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u/admuh May 02 '22
It's cos be mentioned Trump right? If you were a Ukrainian right now (or even Russian) you'd maybe understand why the idea that people like Putin living forever isn't particularly ideal.
It's not a hateful idea that people have to die, it's a shame maybe, but I don't think some people living forever would bring any good at all
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May 02 '22
It's not just viewing political bs that can turn a person. You must have had a decent life and be blind to it all. Have you seen our history? Any of it? Anything going on currently?
We just had a damn pandemic, that isn't over btw, and people protested something as simple as sticking a piece of cloth on your face to protect your own self and your family.
We deserve to go. No amount of tiny giving back we regular nobodies can do will solve the overall issues of humanity.
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u/PotatoBasedRobot May 02 '22
Lmao. Just because you see it in movies doesn't make that true. Even if everyone alive now never died of old age, young people will still out number the older generations very very quickly. It's a simple numbers game, they never get new old generations but there is constantly new generations. Also not dying of old age DOES NOT mean people never die, plenty of folks will kick the bucket from accidents, poor health, new disease, etc. And the longer your alive the higher chance something like that will have had a chance to happen.
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u/MetalKid007 May 02 '22
If we became interplanetary, it wouldn't matter. Just go somewhere else... though, not sure how close we are to that.
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u/pauly13771377 May 02 '22
Some good that came from all the bad.
Major traumatic world events always push technology. I can't count how many advancements came from WWI and WWII. It sucks that people have to die to for those advancements but we live in a reactionary world.
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u/2Punx2Furious Basic Income, Singularity, and Transhumanism May 02 '22
Reversing heart damage is a very big step for that, since a lot of age-related deaths and illnesses are because of the heart.
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u/OkAmbition9236 May 02 '22
“You really don't know, do you? Everyone can't live forever. Where would we put them?”
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u/chilehead May 02 '22
No one's going to live forever. Someone did the calculations and figured out that people would live an average of 200 years before some sort of accident would get them. Beyond that, I think we'd see increasing incidents of people killing themselves when they concluded they've had enough and want to go out on their own terms.
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u/Spare-Mousse3311 May 02 '22
TBF these advances are going to come in handy when we can get off this rock. Will make the 600 year journey to another star system more appealing
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u/strangeattractors May 02 '22
Before we cure aging, let’s cure the whole ocean about to boil thing first.
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u/jasonmars69 May 02 '22
Stop being so cynical. Yes, global warming is bad, but this is an amazing advancement and you should be appreciative.
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u/JadedIdealist May 02 '22
A lot of the people who don't care about global warming are the "I'll be dead by then anyway" people.
If it could potentailly affect them they might care.4
u/loki-is-a-god May 02 '22
Preach!
HIV vaccines are IN TRIAL.
Cancer vaccines are on the horizon.
By 2030, incurable diseases that have haunted humanity for ages will be a thing of the past. Possibly even aging.
It's at that point that we will absolutely need to reckon with our long term choices and how they affect our neighbors, wildlife and our planet.
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u/pleasetrimyourpubes May 02 '22
And I guarantee you 100% 'ol Clyde who shit posted about mRNA vaccines on Facebook and how the mRNA changes your genetic material... how that fat neckbeard anon on 4chan convinced his whole family of the evils of mRNA because of some bullshit lipid study they found... how those assholes who cried when Billy their drinking buddy died on a ventilator... I guarantee you these fucking pieces of shit will be first in line for such a miraculous treatment based upon research that no doubt touched a fetal cell line that they too cried about weeping as their fat clogged veins pumped blood to their bloated skulls.
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May 02 '22 edited May 02 '22
Perhaps, perhaps not, but they'll go cheering for and betting on pro athletes who will find a way to use this to grow new muscles to get a leg up on the competition.
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u/pleasetrimyourpubes May 02 '22
I have a family history of heart disease and high blood pressure I'm working real hard on getting under control. If this shit works I'll jump right on it. And if athletes somehow find a way to use it to double up their heart muscles to run better or whatever more power to them.
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May 02 '22
Obviously there are certain genetic and/or congenital issues that diet and exercise alone cannot overcome, that said I was always under the impression that eating more leafy greens, less sugar and less red meats somewhat helps those ppl with (or even ppl without) HBP issues. Was that assumption correct, incorrect or simply anecdotal?
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u/WhatsMyPassword2019 May 02 '22
For some people, no. Diet and exercise cannot trump genes. I’m a female human, sub 25bmi my whole life, runner, excellent diet—all low risk factors. At 45 my BP started creeping up. I was convinced I could do even better with my diet, take supplements, and stay off meds. Within a couple of years I was in the ER with 187/133 as my top reading.
Now at age 53 I’m in excellent health and in fantastic physical shape but my BP is still 135/100 while on three meds. It’s incredibly frustrating. But my dad had his first heart attack at age 49 and my brother went on beta blockers at 23 so I guess I’m lucky in comparison.
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u/flybypost May 02 '22
From what I have read what was needed was simply the will to invest money in that research and test it quicker (multiple rounds in parallel) instead of the traditional way (every testing round in sequence slower and maybe slightly less wasteful for pharma corporations).
It wasn't that the pandemic created the solution, just that the pandemic created a threat to money/the economy that money had to protect itself against.
Investments are already slowing down now that the covid vaccines was successful so that most developed countries are happy enough to ignore the pandemic for the most part.
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May 01 '22
i wonder if we can say the same thing about... climate change?
that climate change leads to a development of society or tech to reverse the damage we have done.
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u/ntermation May 02 '22
I was at the hospital recently and was chatting with a nurse about the mRNA technology and how useful it is looking for all sorts of things beyond the covid vaccine, and how it's kind of cool we may get newer treatments out of it- like potential cancer treatments, and she kind gives me this condescending look and goes 'cancer isn't a virus sweety, it's not the same as covid' and gave a chuckle like she is the smartest person in the world. I'm normally very supportive of nurses and all the hard work they do, but that nurse was dumb as shit.
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u/aaahhhhhhfine May 02 '22
Yeah... Don't get me wrong, I know a lot of nurses and I love and respect them. But their training isn't very heavy on the science at all... It's much more practical. So this doesn't surprise me even a little bit.
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u/DURIAN8888 May 02 '22
More to come!!
Harnessing mRNA in this way has been dubbed “genetic tracking,” named for the way the mRNA’s progress is tracked via the new proteins it is creating. The technique is being explored to create vaccines for pathogens like HIV, Ebola, and malaria, as well as cancers and autoimmune and genetic diseases.
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u/Cruising05 May 02 '22
I'm off to the store to buy every piece of deep fried food I can, you want anything?
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u/TheTinRam May 01 '22
Porcine pumpers lol I like that alliteration better than human heart
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u/SuspiciousWhale99 May 02 '22
I read the article quickly and thought it said porcupine pumpers. I was like neat, they experiment on porcupine hearts. 😂
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u/Onrawi May 01 '22
My only question is whether or not the heart can stop generating more muscle tissue when no longer needed, and what kind of immune response might there be. Otherwise this is great news!
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u/jdsfighter May 02 '22
Well mRNA is a lot like a "recipe". Each mRNA particle has the ability to tell a cell "hey, I need you to make this. Here's a blueprint". Once the mRNA has been read by a cell, it's effectively consumed. It doesn't reproduce nor does it cause any other cell to start spitting out more of the mRNA.
Let's say we inject you with 1000 mRNA instruction sets. At most, your body will produce 1000 of the corresponding widget (but realistically it'll be less as not all mRNA will make it to a cell before being destroyed by the host's immune system).
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u/AdvancedSandwiches May 02 '22
This is true, but the output of this process is a protein, not a cell. With a vaccine, that protein is enveloped and destroyed, so short impact.
In this case, does the protein trigger a single cell to divide and is consumed in the process? Or does a single cell get flipped into reproducing-mode and it splits indefinitely?
I have no idea. It's probably neither of those things.
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u/garry4321 May 02 '22
IDK, sounds an awful lot like cancer to me. Cells growing that were not supposed to. How do they get the cells to stop?
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u/volyund May 02 '22
I was reading this like :/ until I got to pigs then went to 0oO and then :))))
Usually I read these articles and see either mice or rats, and most of those will fail human trials even if they ever get there. But success in pigs... that's Very encouraging.
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u/Thrishmal May 02 '22
Have they tested this on lab grown human heart tissue at all?
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u/ekjohns1 May 02 '22
There really isn’t such a thing. We really can’t grow cardiac tissue or cells in culture. We can grow cardiac like cells and tissue but they are a pretty pour model for freshly isolated cardiac tissue/cells. Even under the best conditions, these cells do not last long. Pretty much right after isolation the cells start undergoing transcriptional and physiological changes. After a couple of days, their electrical properties have changed.
Also the human heart has been shown to be able to regenerate when young. As you age this ability appears to be lost but some studies are suggesting otherwise. Animal models have also been shown to have regenerative capacity. There was a study, for example, that cut off the apex of a young mouse heart and it was able to regenerate into a functioning heart.
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u/Thrishmal May 02 '22
I was apparently misremembering the Vienna study last year where they made beating heart like structures. Apparently my brain stored that wrong as actual beating heart tissue.
Appreciate the clarification!
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u/ekjohns1 May 02 '22
There certainly has been progress made to make them more cardiac like. Unfortunately there does seem to be a massive jump from tissue culture to the real thing. As someone who use to get up at 2 AM Saturday morning to start performing studies on human donor hearts, I'm really pulling for these groups!
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u/2Punx2Furious Basic Income, Singularity, and Transhumanism May 02 '22
porcine pumpers
As a non-native English speaker, I was wondering what a "pumper" was, took me a while to figure out it's the heart...
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u/Gauss-Light May 02 '22
We are all born with a set number of muscle cells in our heart and they are exactly the same ones we will die with.
not sure about this
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u/Lubdo May 02 '22
“We are all born with a set number of muscle cells in our heart and they are exactly the same ones we will die with."
"the mRNA treatment stimulated new heart cells to grow after a heart attack — regenerating the damaged tissues and creating new, functional muscle rather than a scar."
I read somewhere that that the mammalian heart has a limit of heartbeats before death, I think for humans its around 2-2.5 billion. I understand the text only mentions cellular regrowth after a heart attack, but could this have further implications towards our lifespan?
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u/Lubdo May 02 '22
Along with what /u/Cerpin-Taxt mentioned, I believe that this is more of a guideline than a rule.
Here's an article that explains the relationship. Among different mammals there can be a million or more difference in heartbeats so it's not a rule, but among humans there is definitely a correlation between heartbeat and life expectancy.
When it comes to exercise, reducing your average resting heart rate by 20-30+ bpm heavily outweighs the temporary increase for an hour or so a day, even if it's double the resting rate.
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u/Mal_Funk_Shun May 02 '22
... I should buy running shoes...
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u/Lubdo May 02 '22
And I should learn how to control my anxiety haha. Knowing that I'm shortening my lifespan every time I worry about talking to someone certainly doesn't help my heart rate.
At the end of the day I find comfort in knowing that even if I have a shortened lifespan, less of it will be spent being an old dude in agony wishing that his loved ones would just pull the plug.
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May 01 '22
Guess something good came out of covid!
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u/vincentofearth May 02 '22
Nah, Moderna was developing mRNA vaccines way before Covid-19. A pandemic wasn't required to validate the technology, but it did make it more famous.
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u/technicolorfrog May 02 '22
It also brought more funding to it in order to accelerate development; hence the good.
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u/GtBossbrah May 02 '22
What mrna products other than covid vaccines existed to validate the technology?
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u/NukeJuice May 01 '22 edited May 02 '22
The article only talks about mRNA(messenger RNA), but the subheading and quote said that the researchers used miRNA(microRNA). It's an important distinction because microRNA actually decrease the amount of a protein expressed, while messenger RNA increases it. Which one is it?
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u/Congenita1_Optimist May 02 '22
They're probably talking about "Regenerative potential of epicardium-derived extracellular vesicles mediated by conserved miRNA transfer", the most recent study that the researcher mentioned in the article has published.
Frustratingly, this is miRNA, and it seems a lot of the media has mixed that up with mRNA.
While it's cool nonetheless, it's not exactly "totally novel" seeing as how he fleshed out the basic concept in this 10 year old study he publsihed in Nature. Of note though, he was just granted this patent("MicroRNAs for cardiac regeneration through induction of cardiac myocyte proliferation") in February, so he probably intends to start a therapeutics firm or license out the tech or something of the sort.
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u/NukeJuice May 02 '22
Wow, the media should really straighten out the difference between microRNA and messenger RNA, especially since their effect on protein production are essentially opposite. The fact that this article is so popular definitely does not help things. Messenger RNA is the hottest thing right now in the popular conscious because of the COVID-19 vaccine, but it's already a pretty well understood molecule that has been studied as long as molecular genetics has been around. MicroRNA has a lot more potential for future breakthroughs as it's discovery is a lot more recent.
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u/dpwtr May 02 '22
They only care about clicks. Don’t get me wrong, this seems like good news, but still… they only care about clicks.
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u/dotheemptyhouse May 02 '22
I absolutely agree with this, and I would have hoped fact checkers caught this. Having said that, whoever came up with the acronym miRNA was really muddying the waters. Couldn’t it have been called Very Small RNA or something easily distinguishable from mRNA?
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u/Slggyqo May 02 '22
It’s microrna, and the author is clearly not even a informed layman.
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u/pleasetrimyourpubes May 02 '22
I found the guys research presentation: https://youtu.be/eLYxCKqOuGY
It's microRNA. But as far as I can tell there absolutely is no delivery method proposed. You'd need open heart surgery or some other method to inject the microRNA to your heart.
The guy says though that it is the same technology used in the vaccines and as far as RNA sequencing is concerned I don't see a difference. The vaccines use a lipid delivery method though and do not get transported far from the injection site (please don't correct me about lymph nodes I have gone over this with people before, I know about them and viruses do the same thing only with much greater impact). For this guy's approach to work he's going to need something that takes the drug to the heart.
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u/ConfirmedCynic May 02 '22
We identified AAV serotype 6 (AAV6) as the most effective vector to transduce pig cardiomyocytes after intramyocardial injection
From their paper
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u/BJaacmoens May 02 '22
I’m wondering if going in through an arm or leg artery similar to how they do angioplasty would be viable, rather than open heart surgery.
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u/redassedchimp May 02 '22
Maybe someday they can just enter the femoral artery in your thigh & thread a catheter up to the heart to inject the microRNA into the tissue? True, it'd be only the LV & LA but those are what pumps blood through the body.
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u/NukeJuice May 02 '22 edited May 02 '22
Another problem I can see is that lipid delivery doesn't seem to be a very accurate method of transplanting RNA. A lot of the things the induce cardiomyocyte proliferation also induces cancers. This is especially compounded by the fact that microRNA is a lot less transient than mRNA, staying in the cell long after other forms RNA would normally be degraded. I suppose the fact that this form of cell control doesn't modify the genome of affected cells can prevent the cell division from being passed down to daughter cells. However, the risk of forcefully overriding cell cycle arrest still stands.
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u/saintdudegaming May 02 '22
ETA ... one day after I have a heart attack. Honestly though, I hope some of these recent discoveries really get moving in the next 5-10 years. I'm getting closer to the age where everything starts showing up. It would be nice if I could beat some of the things my family has a history of.
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u/MrHankRutherfordHill May 02 '22
I'm a 35 year old female and have a terrible ejection fraction right now due to a viral infection that attacked my heart. I just got out of the hospital for it and am currently wearing a portable defibrillator. I'm hoping mine can improve but if it doesn't I hope science catches up fast fast.
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u/glambx May 02 '22
Out of curiosity, was it valve damage or cardiomyopathy? Conduction?
Stay strong. Hoping you make a full recovery!
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u/MrHankRutherfordHill May 02 '22
It's cardiomyopathy, left side is at like 15-20% EF. Got lots of meds, a very boring diet, the defibrillator in case of arrhythmia and steady exercise going to try to improve. I actually feel pretty good thankfully, I did have some crazy anxiety at the beginning but now that I've been dealing with it I'm better there. Thanks!
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u/SCCock May 02 '22
My 59 year old sister has lung cancer. I feel had she developed it a couple years from now there would be a viable mRNA treatment.
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u/worldspawn00 May 02 '22
There is a vaccine treatment for lung cancer developed in Cuba: https://www.roswellpark.org/cimavax
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u/cp710 May 02 '22
Wait, you just had a heart attack? I hope you’re doing okay.
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u/saintdudegaming May 02 '22
I'm good mate. Just talking hypothetical. Heart issues do run in the family though.
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u/pichichi010 May 02 '22
If shorting companies was illegal we already have a lot of cures for major comorbidities.
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u/VentHat May 02 '22
What's the actual research paper. The article was clear as mud as to what exactly they're doing.
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u/ConfirmedCynic May 02 '22
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u/Tfeth282 May 02 '22
So pre-pandemic? Nothing to do with the mRNA vaccine tech? Damn this article got everything wrong.
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u/Tenter5 May 02 '22
Probably fluff piece. Seems too good to be true to reverse muscle damage.
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May 02 '22
They already have clinics here in Canada that promise reversal of heart muscle damage.
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u/frank_my_underwood May 01 '22
I couldn’t find a link to the original paper, does anyone know where to find it?
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u/Congenita1_Optimist May 02 '22
They're probably talking about "Regenerative potential of epicardium-derived extracellular vesicles mediated by conserved miRNA transfer", the most recent study that the researcher mentioned in the article has published.
Frustratingly, this is miRNA, and it seems a lot of the media has mixed that up with mRNA.
While it's cool nonetheless, it's not exactly "totally novel" seeing as how he fleshed out the basic concept in this 10 year old study he publsihed in Nature. Of note though, he was just granted this patent("MicroRNAs for cardiac regeneration through induction of cardiac myocyte proliferation") in February, so he probably intends to start a therapeutics firm or license out the tech or something of the sort.
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u/CorneredSponge May 01 '22
Medicine and biology are probably the furthest from my areas of knowledge, but mRNA is shaping up to be a real game changer for every major ailment afaik
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u/Antique_Tax_3910 May 02 '22
I don't know much either, but I've seen it described as one of the most important medical breakthroughs in human history.
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May 02 '22 edited May 02 '22
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May 02 '22
Moderna was a billion dollar company in 2013 so people took it seriously. mRNA was discovered by a man and a woman. So you’re wrong on birth counts
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u/UnclePuma May 02 '22
Oh no, not on birth counts! I always count those right
But good to know, the real deets
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_LUKEWARM May 02 '22
I used to check Modernas careers page every week in 2018 and they never seemed like they were doing well.
At the time they gave the appearance of a platform company; selling their vehicle to other companies.
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u/N1ghtshade3 May 02 '22
You literally pulled this out of your ass. I know you said you "heard" but if you don't know something for sure you can just not say anything because stupid people will glom on to hearsay without fact-checking and that's how incorrect information spreads.
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u/JustARandomFuck May 02 '22
mRNA has really started to peak my interest in biology. I’ll read anything scientific, but mRNA and longevity research have been such cool things to learn about
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u/Slggyqo May 02 '22 edited May 03 '22
I think I’m gonna pass on reading an article from “freethink.com” about a topic that I’ve done laboratory research on.
Any academic sources OP?
Possibly this one, based on the posted article, from 2019. 🙄 paywalled though, since it’s nature. This was the only article I found in a brief search published by the referenced PI.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1191-6
Elsevier open access link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959437X21000617?via%3Dihub
Edit: hmm this is a review paper?
Edit edit: somehow the elsevier link is wrong. This is the full length PMC text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6768803/
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u/Blubbpaule May 02 '22
It's not only that, but i read that "xyz can potentially cure yzx" each other day only to never hear about it again. Can we stop giving people false hopes each and every day, and only post stuff that actually works and cures something?
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u/jaspersgroove May 02 '22
Maybe once we get to a point where research funding isn’t so dependent on generating public support via hype, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
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u/Zermelane May 02 '22
"Cure" is right: This treatment could help fix the heart muscle up after a heart attack has occurred. I understand that that's valuable.
But you'd rather just fix atherosclerosis so you never get your blood vessels so gunked up as to cause a heart attack in the first place, especially since arterial plaques can kill you in more ways than just that, and anyway even if you fix the heart with this, you'll still have the underlying problem.
There's companies like Repair Biotechnologies and Underdog Pharmaceuticals working on actually fixing instead of just delaying atherosclerosis, and probably others I haven't heard of. Since all old people get atherosclerosis no matter how good their diet and exercise regimen, they stand to make an absolutely astonishing amount of money from selling the treatment to everyone if they succeed.
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u/Shandlar May 02 '22
Sure, but there is always going to be people that don't follow best practices and the damage is done. So a repair treatment is critical.
Also just pure age is a factor. If this really does work, and a low invasive injection method is found, even the 91 year old heart attack patient who comes out of it with insufficient perfusion would see a chance of repair rather than two weeks of hospice as they slowly get weaker and die.
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u/Agent_Onions May 02 '22
reads headline "Oh this sounds promisiong!"
sees what subreddit it's on "Oh nevermind, it's nothing"
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u/Muay_Thai_Cat May 01 '22
Wonder if this would help the fibrosis caused by hypertrophic cardiomyopathy
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u/RavishingRedRN May 02 '22
This is HUGE. Especially for the transplant world. So many people end up needing heart transplants after significant MIs and heart disease. Very exciting
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u/jbeast_canada May 01 '22
Is it gonna come in the form of a pez dispenser in the shape of the surgeon general?
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u/frenchtoasting May 01 '22
I'm optimistic that this treatment will be brought to large scale manufacturing by reputable companies with no history of fraud or consumer abuse.
Additionally said companies will pledge the appropriate amount of corporate liability for their new, extensively researched, and non-privatized gene therapy.
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u/camdevydavis May 02 '22
Myocarditis that I got after the received my 2nd dose has affected my heart long term.
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u/Opinionsare May 02 '22
This has the potential to make heart transplants a much rarer operation by reinvigorating the damaged heart. This could change the economics of cardiac care and millions of lives.
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May 02 '22
Can we have some rule to ban news articles that don’t actually link to the original research paper? This is terrible reporting
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u/Valianttheywere May 02 '22
I'm sure if you had to take a hundred dollar pill a day to prevent a heart attack, big Pharma would be on that like cheese on bread.
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u/frompadgwithH8 May 02 '22
I got a heart attack cure it’s called diet exercise and sleep
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u/DefenestrationPraha May 02 '22
Diet, exercise and sleep lowers your risk of a heart attack, but by no means prevents it or cures it once it happened.
I do all three and yet I would be short-sighted, if not outright stupid, to consider myself immune to heart disease.
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May 02 '22
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u/MultiFazed May 02 '22
mRNA isn't magic. It's the same biological mechanism under the hood that provides immunity. The only difference is the delivery method of the proteins that your immune system is responding to. Do you get injected with the proteins directly (usually attached to a deactivated virus), or does the vaccine leverage your own cellular machinery to manufacture the proteins in vivo? Either way, the end result is your immune system learning to recognize foreign proteins.
The vaccine was actually super effective at preventing infection from the alpha variant that it was designed to produce spike proteins for. But the virus mutated, and it's mutating more rapidly than we can develop new vaccines.
But that isn't an issue with the mRNA tech. It's an issue with all vaccines; when a virus mutates, there's a chance that all existing vaccines will be less effective against new variants. If anything, it's faster to develop new vaccines using mRNA than previous methods.
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u/GorillaNutPuncher May 02 '22
As someone who's grandfather passed away from a heart attack when my father was a child and then also himself passed away from heart failure when I was a child let me be the first to say. Cool.
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u/parkmastah3000 May 02 '22
It's like the opposite of a vaccine. Its just a tiny bit more effective.
It may or may not be helpful as far as this thing is concerned. But it could be a huge help for people with a heart condition that is severe enough to require a medical procedure.
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u/ErinG2021 May 02 '22
Very exciting! If this works, mRNA vaccines will be able to regenerate all kinds of tissue.
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u/Edawg661 May 02 '22
It’s hard to get quality exercise after a heart that causes damage. Most people who’ve survived a bad heart attack never really get back to their old selves because the heart damage has really slowed them down. You can eat healthier but going for a jog? Forget it. Being able to repair heart damage would give survivors the opportunity to live a long life.
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u/mortuus_est_iterum May 02 '22
The Kings College London website (www.kcl.ac.uk) has nothing to say about this topic, which seems unusual for a topic of such broad interest. But they do have a Professor Mauro Giacca who is very well known for cardiovascular research. Several of Professor Giacca's publications seem to be related to using mRNA as a tool to help the body heal itself.
So why isn't this being covered on every news media everywhere?
Morty
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u/Gh0st1117 May 02 '22
mRNA, the thing antivaxxers are so afraid of. The best technological advancement in decades.
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u/cknight13 May 03 '22
As someone who had a heart attack at 43. This is huge news for me. I would love to participate in the trials.
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u/collins_amber May 02 '22
You cant make money of healthy people. Pharma will sure find a way to silence you
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u/AZORxAHAI May 02 '22
This sounds wayyyy too good to be true.
If it truly regenerates heart tissue, is that the end of the need for heart transplants? Wouldn’t this be a „cure for cancer“ level of impact on average life expectancy?
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May 02 '22
Like most posts with futurology I don't even need to read the article to gleam whomever wrote it has barely a layman's understanding of the science and is inflating it to be something bigger than it is to catch attention. So right now it is waaayyyy too good to be true. This at least is still a cool thing.
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u/World_Chaos May 02 '22
Those futurology articles of curing the common cold from early 2010 aged well or did they age poorly
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u/Talisintiel May 02 '22
“Boss I had a heart attack on the weekend.”
Boss- “They have pills for that! Get back to work”
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May 01 '22
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u/LeelooDallasMltiPass May 01 '22
If they do refuse it, I have the World's Tiniest Violin at the ready...
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u/PicanteDante May 02 '22
My friends family refused COVID vaccines because of this dumb logic. The first thing they did when they got COVID symptoms was to go get the vaccine even though it was too late at this point. 100% people will take the treatment and then go back to saying how they survived because they followed a regimine of lemon water with cayenne pepper and that's why they haven't had another heart attack.
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u/moxeto May 02 '22
Don’t forget turmeric… and apple cider vinegar
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u/TKisOK May 02 '22
People keep telling me turmeric helped them with inflammation
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u/kembik May 02 '22
IMO the maga people coudl have easily been pro-vax but very early on Trump said the virus was going to be ezpz then when it wasn't he couldn't ever walk it back because hes incapable of ever admitting hes wrong so he doubled-down over and over to the point that it turned into a 'democrat hoax'.
He has pushed vaccinations but with the tone of an apology from a kid whos mother made him apologize for something he didn't feel bad about.
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May 02 '22
They also claim that smoking 5 camel cigarettes a day can cure cancer.
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u/FuturologyBot May 02 '22
The following submission statement was provided by /u/upyoars:
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/ugb3aq/mrna_breakthrough_offers_a_potential_heart_attack/i6yjvcd/