Virus to cure Heart disease ?

Virus to cure Heart disease ?

Scientists are preparing to infect heart disease patients with genetically engineered viruses. These modified microbes would kick start the patient's heart into manufacturing life saving proteins and so restore their health.

Scientists have found that as heart disease begins to affect a person, arteries thicken, cholesterol levels rise, and the heart cells become damaged. As a result, cells stop making a series of key proteins needed for their survival. After this the course of the disease is downhill and the patient becomes a time bomb. The cells perform less and less well, until full cardiac arrest ensures.

Researchers have pin pointed a protein, Serca-2, that determines the health of the cardiac cells. In low levels, a person risks heart attack. In elevated amounts, their prospects look good.

It is one thing identifying a missing protein and very different matter when you try to put it back in a cell. Researchers seem to have found a way out by using genetically modified viruses.

Normally viruses infect our body by inserting DNA into our cells, which then begin to manufacture fragments of virus. By adding a gene for a particular protein to a virus, an infected cell will then be persuaded to manufacture that protein as well.

Prof Godfrey Smith of Glasgow University's Institute of Biomedical and Life science and his team involved in this project of using viruses, genetically engineered to make the heart protein, are getting heart cells, grown in the laboratory, to resume manufacture of normal levels of Serca-2. The final phase would be to launch clinical trails which may be a long time because risks involved in gene therapy.

The Glasgow project has also developed a test to detect when heart cells have become seriously damaged and which can therefore predict when a person is at imminent risk of having a major coronary. It was found by them that a diseased heart releases large amount of a protein called BNP -- Brain Natiuretic peptide. This is used as a test.

The end result would be a test that would pin point potential heart attack victims, and development of techniques that may counter their condition.

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