The Chong Laboratory at the Westmead Institute for Medical Research is pioneering a new treatment to repair heart muscle after heart attack, one which could radically transform the way heart disease is treated in Australia and the world over.

Professor James Chong and his team are using stem cells to grow new heart muscle to repair damaged and failing hearts. In practice, stem cells will be used to create new heart muscle to replace and repair areas of damage.

This an extremely promising line of investigation that could revolutionise the treatment of heart disease by eliminating the need for heart transplants within the next decade. That means that those whose quality of life is compromised by heart damage will have an option for immediate treatment – instead of waiting for the rare possibility that a heart will become available for transplant they can move straight away to having their own heart patched and repaired, a much less risky and dangerous option by far.

Professor James Chong says, “We are currently pretty good at using drugs to slow the progression of heart disease. We are good at treating heart attacks when they happen. Yet, we can’t replace dead heart muscle. That’s where stem cells come in. They could replace the dead heart muscle with beating, living heart muscle.”

Professor Chong’s hugely promising heart regeneration research project (jointly funded by the National Stem Cell Foundation of Australia) got underway in 2020, and will be a major project rolling out over five years through to 2024. Over this time Professor Chong and his team will thoroughly investigate the various factors that need to be in place to be able to progress their new concept ‘from bench to bedside’ i.e. from the lab and into patient treatment plans. They will explore methods for growing cardiomyocytes (heart muscles grown from stem cells) quickly and in the volume necessary for their new treatment, they will test the range of drugs that will be necessary to ensure a patient does not reject new transplanted stem cell derived heart muscle, and they will check that they have everything right with the transplant procedure. This work will then pave the way for clinical trials with human patients.

This is an incredibly exciting project and one that has huge potential. It could not only save millions of lives around the world, but it would save billions of dollars in health care costs.

Would you like to help Professor Chong and his team deliver on the promise of their research so that waiting on a heart transplant list becomes a thing of the past? We’d love to hear from you.

To find out more about contributing to this project, contact:

Jayne Wasmuth, Manager, Major Gifts The Westmead Institute for Medical Research Foundation

jayne.wasmuth@wimr.org.au / 0434 602 623