February 25, 2000

Gene transfer could improve function of aging hearts

Researchers from the MGH Cardiovascular Research Center (CVRC) have shown that delivering extra copies of a key gene to the heart muscle using gene therapy techniques can improve cardiac function in aging rats. In the Feb. 22 issue of Circulation, the team reports that transferring additional copies of the gene SERCA2a directly into the hearts of elderly rats alleviates a typical abnormality of aging hearts in which the heart muscle does not relax normally. Previous research has shown that increasing SERCA2a could improve function in actual heart failure, but this study was the first to show that altering gene expression could improve the more common heart abnormalities associated with aging.

"As our population continues to age in the coming years, we know we're going to be seeing more and more people with heart failure, which already is the most frequent cause of hospitalization in people over 65 in this country," says Roger Hajjar, MD, the paper's senior author. "The knowledge that increasing SERCA2a gene expression might improve function of the aging heart gives us a target for therapies that might prevent people from progressing to heart failure."

Hajjar adds that such therapies could be based on new medications that might impact the process controlled by SERCA2a or on new gene therapy approaches that promise to be more effective and safer than systems currently used in research studies. He also stresses that it is by no means certain that these animal results will carry over to human patients and that additional research is required to verify and follow up the current findings.

Hajjar's co-authors are Ulrich Schmidt, MD, PhD, first author; Federica del Monte, MD, PhD; Michael Miyamoto, MD, Takashi Matsui, MD, PhD, and Anthony Rosenzweig, MD, all of the MGH CVRC; and Judith Gwathmey, VMD, PhD, of Boston Medical Center.