Gene therapy seems to be moving past the
"proof of principle" phase with two new treatments described at the
70th Scientific Sessions of the American Heart Association meeting held
in Orlando, Fla November 9 through November 12, 1997. "It is an
opening door," said Valentin Fuster, MD, incoming American Heart
Association President and director of the
Cardiovascular Institute at Mount Sinai Medical Center
in New York City. "It's not definitive, but it's certainly very
exciting."
In each case, researchers used genes to tinker with or get around
disease-causing problems rather than striking directly at the cause of
the disorder itself. These kinds of "incremental" gene therapies
will probably become more common in the next few years as the field
itself matures.
The two groups took very separate attacks on the problem of occlusion
in limbs, or limb ischemia, which affects between 100 000 and
200 000 people in the United States each year. One was an in vivo
experiment injecting genes directly into muscles to encourage the
growth of collateral blood vessels. The second was ex vivo and involved
bathing a vein graft in a solution containing an
oligodeoxynucleotide (ODN) that is a transcription factor
decoy to block gene activity.
Clinical researchers at St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Boston,
Mass, attempted to stimulate the growth of collateral blood vessels in
the patients' legs that had been occluded by atherosclerotic lesions.
In a technique that Jeffrey Isner, MD, of St. Elizabeth's and Tufts
Medical School called "therapeutic angiogenesis," the researchers
inserted
© 1998 American Heart Association, Inc.
Cardiovascular News
Meeting Highlights
Part II: 70th Scientific Sessions of the American Heart Association