Can Heart Damage Be Reversed? Science Says: Maybe

💉🫀 Researchers from University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands have developed an mRNA-based treatment that could one day reverse damage caused by heart attacks.

• The scientists’ work was inspired by the mRNA technology used by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna in their Covid vaccines; the researchers aim to use a similar method to deliver mRNA ‘messengers’ that instruct a patient’s heart cells to repair themselves after a heart attack.
• Their most recent study, which was presented at a conference last Friday, focused on whether mRNA could be delivered directly to the heart muscle; in clinical trials on mice, the researchers found mRNA successfully reached their heart cells ~24 hours after injection.

📸 Big picture: mRNA-based treatments are a fairly new technology – the first vaccine to hit the market came in 2020 to protect against Covid, though shots for other diseases were tested in mice as early as the 1990s. The biggest hurdle to overcome was that mRNA would quickly degrade before it could deliver its ‘message’ to cells.

• The solution only came-about recently thanks to advances in nanotechnology; new lipid nanoparticles were developed to wrap the mRNA like a bubble and preserve it long enough to enter cells.

👩‍🔬 Zoom out: Researchers are in the process of developing and testing new mRNA treatments to combat HIV, cancers, autoimmune and genetic diseases, and more.