"A new stem cell treatment resurrects dead scarred heart https muscle damaged by a recent heart attack https The finding just in time for Valentines Day is the clearest evidence yet that literally broken hearts can heal. All thats needed is a little help from ones own heart stem cells https We have been trying as doctors for centuries to find a treatment that actually reverses heart injury Eduardo Marban MD PhD tells WebMD. That is what we seem to have been able to achieve in this small number of patients. If so this could change the nature of medicine. We could go to the root of disease and cure it instead of just work around it. Marban director of the CedarsSinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles led the study. He invented the cardiosphere culture technique used to create the stem cells https and founded the company developing the treatment. Its the first completed controlled clinical trial https showing that scarred heart tissue can be repaired. Earlier work in patients with heart failure https using different stem cells https or bonemarrow stem cells https also showed that the heart can regenerate itself. These findings suggest that this therapeutic approach is feasible and has the potential to provide a treatment strategy for cardiac regeneration after heart attack https write University of Hong Kong researchers ChungWah Siu and HungFat Tse. Their editorial accompanies the Marban report in the Feb.  advance online issue of The Lancet. The stem cells dont do what people think they do Marban says. Its been thought that the stem cells multiply over and over again. In time they were supposed to be turning themselves and their daughter cells into new working heart muscle. But the stem cells seem to be doing something much more amazing. For reasons we didnt initially know they stimulate the heart to fix itself Marban says. The repair is from the heart itself and not from the cells we give them. Exactly how the stem cells do this is a matter of feverish research in Marbans lab. The phase I clinical trial enrolled  patients who had just had a heart attack https On average each patient had lost a quarter of his heart muscle. MRI https scans showed massive scars. Eight patients got standard care. The other  received increasing infusions of what Marban calls stem cells. The cells were grown in the lab from tiny amounts of heart cells taken from the patients own hearts via biopsy https Six to  weeks later the cells were infused directly back into patients hearts. A year later the mass of scar tissue in the treated patients hearts got  smaller. And healthy heart muscle increased by . No such regeneration was seen in the patients who got standard care. Because all of the patients were doing relatively well there was no dramatic difference in clinical outcome. However treated patients had a bit better exercise https endurance. This discovery challenges the conventional wisdom that once established cardiac scarring is permanent and that once lost healthy heart muscle cannot be restored Marban and colleagues conclude."