Transcript ABC-TV CATALYST Program - 1 June 2006

Dr Maryanne Demasi, Reporter : William Henry is on borrowed time.

William Henry : At the moment I've got heart failure. In 2000 I had a heart bypass after having about four heart attacks and that fixed that problem.

Reporter : But the bypass was only a temporary fix. Much of his heart is now dead. Doctors have declared him inoperable.

Mr Henry : You feel depressed and the more depressed you are the less likely you are to want to do something.

Reporter : There were no options for William until he was thrown an unexpected lifeline - a chance to be the guinea pig in a revolutionary new medical trial.

William has volunteered to have cells harvested from his own body and injected directly into his failing heart.

Mr Henry : Nobody knows whether it is going to work or not, but uh got nothing to lose

Reporter: The inspiration for Williams's radical new therapy dates back to the 1950's. Scientists were studying a form of cancer called teratoma. Within a teratoma tumour, cells develop into bizarrely misplaced body parts.

Professor Martin Pera, Australian Stem Cell Centre : Like these, this teratoma here contains muscle, gut like cells, cartilage, skin and a whole range of other cell types. Sometimes you even find teeth or hair in these tumours.

Reporter : Scientists discovered that the hair, teeth and other tissues were growing from a new type of cell – they named them stem cells.

It was realised that within an embryo, stem cells enable the development of all of our different body parts.

And nurtured in a lab, they held the promise of curing many diseases.

Professor Pera : I think the potential application of both adult and embryonic stem cells in regenerative medicine is incredible.

Reporter : But not everyone is so enthusiastic. There are fears that stem cells may be rejected or even cause cancer. And embryonic stem cell research has been banned in Australia , largely because of ethical and moral objections.

William's operation will side step these concerns because it will use adult stem cells.

Here at the (John) Hunter Hospital in Newcastle , adult stem cells are being harvested from Williams's own bone marrow.

Professor Silviu Itescu, Chief Scientific Officer, Mesoblast Limited : Effectively an adult stem cell, which is present in us in all ages, is derived from an embryonic stem cell, which we all have obviously at birth. The difference is that the adult stem cells are already partially differentiated, meaning that once you obtain them and expand them it is a lot easier to turn them into the type of tissues that you're looking for.

Reporter : If medical maverick Dr Silviu Itescu is right, one particular type of adult stem cells will allow him forge a whole new avenue in the way diseases and accidents are treated.

They're called Mesenchymal Precursor Cells. Hidden within our bone marrow, only around one in a hundred thousand cells is a Mesenchymal.

Professor Itescu : We've been able to purify these cells at very high levels, and train them in the laboratory to become cartilage cells, bone cells, artery cells.

Reporter : Williams's bone marrow has been sent to a lab in Melbourne . They'll follow Silviu's recipe for extracting Mesenchymal cells.

Antibodies that attach only to Mesenchymal cells are added to the bone marrow.

Next into the mix are minute magnetic beads that only attach themselves to the antibodies.

Then a magnet is simply passed over the bone marrow blend. It draws out the magnetically tagged Mesenchymal cells leaving unwanted cells behind.

Voila!

Professor Itescu : These cells are expanded over a period of four to six weeks under sterile conditions with certain media and certain nourishments. And from a very few numbers of cells we end up with hundreds of millions of cells that can be grown up over a short space of time.

Reporter : Six weeks later, more than enough of William's cells have been cooked up and delivered back to Newcastle Hospital .

Finally it's D-day at … the day William hopes will save his life.

While injecting bone marrow into human hearts has been tried before, this will be the first time vast numbers of pure Mesenchymal cells have been used.

Professor Itescu : Once we're comfortable that the actual cell process is safe, we will move to perform larger studies to prove that the cells actually work.

It's the real meaning of regenerative medicine.

Reporter : A specialised support team and their medical equipment have been flown in from the USA to assist with this landmark procedure.

Professor Itescu : Try again - there it is.

Reporter : Another world first that's happening here is the actual catheter they're using. It allows the cardiologist to find the healthiest heart tissue to inject the stem cells into, giving them the best chance of doing their job.

Reporter : The fine catheter is carefully manoeuvred around the inside of Williams's heart. When it senses electrical charges from active heart muscle, the area is marked on a 3-D computer image of William's heart. The healthy areas of his heart are colour coded red.

Professor Itescu : There we go. It's really in the muscle now. Okay.

Reporter : A critical step is about to begin. The stem cells will only survive if they are injected into healthy heart tissue.

A fine needle is inserted through the catheter. Guided by x-rays linked to the computer image, a surgeon delivers 20 injections and 100 million new stem cells directly into William's heart.

Silviu believes that chemical signals from the existing healthy heart cells will activate the stem cells to grow into new muscle and blood cells. William won't have a new heart, he'll have a re-conditioned one.

Professor Itescu : We were very happy with the way things went today.

The cells were injected without any problems whatsoever and the patient is stable.

Reporter : It will be a few months before William's finds out whether there are any signs of his heart repairing itself, and around six months before he learns if the procedure was a success.

If all goes well, Williams's new heart will be just the first triumph in Silviu's grand vision. His years of research are aimed at exploiting another unique quality of Mesenchymal cells – they aren't rejected so they can be injected into unrelated patients.

Professor Itescu : So that really opens the possibility of using them in a very different way. And that would be to have universal, to have young, healthy, robust donors who would provide bone marrow as a source for isolating the starting material of these mesenchymal precursor cells.

Reporter : The idea is to grow them up in large numbers to create banks of ready-to-go stem cells that could be used in emergency situations - from heart attacks, to bone fractures and even sports injuries.

Professor Itescu : I think I'm careful and I think I'm wary. But I think I understand where you need to push the technology in a safe way to the next level. I think my clinic work in cardiac transplant medicine has taught me that there are times when clinicians need to drive the science.

Reporter : It's a science that could routinely be treating patients in as few as two or three years - thanks to unlikely heroes like William Henry.

Mr Henry : I'm no worse off it if doesn't work. I'm just thinking positive and hoping that it does work.

I think even it doesn't help me it may help somebody else and I think it's a good thing to do.

ENDS

For further information, please call:

Julie Meldrum
Mesoblast Limited
0419 228 128
julie.meldrum@mesoblast.com

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