Israeli doctors have developed an innovative medicine for heart failure, Kaplan Medical Centre in Central Israel reported on Tuesday.
Heart failure is a state in which the heart activity fails to the point of shortness of breath and edema, the most common cause of mortality and hospitalisations over the age of 65.
One of the main causes of heart failure is the amyloidosis disease (“Alzheimer’s of the heart”), protein accumulation in between the heart muscle cells, disrupting the heart’s activity.
For many years, cardiac amyloidosis, like Alzheimer’s’, has been considered an incurable disease.
Recently, for the first time, a drug that partially slows down the heart injury process was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but the road to healing is still long.
Kaplan Medical Center’s researchers, however, have developed the innovative drug that has the full healing potential of the disease.
Their study, including successful animal experiments was published in the European Heart Journal.
The new drug is an antibody that activates the immune system cells in the heart, so they will swallow and break down the amyloid protein that accumulates in the heart.
This way, thus the cardiac muscle cells are protected and return to normal functioning.
The next step, according to the researchers, is to apply these findings to the treatment of heart failure patients with amyloidosis background. (Xinhua/NAN)