Abu Dhabi
A medical team from King Abdul Aziz University has succeeded in registering a patent at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, for a new medical nano-based compound that improves the working of the cardiac muscle, after it was successfully tested on experimental animals, and it was determined that the compound is fit for human use.
Professor Ahmed bin Saeed Azhar, consultant pediatric cardiologist at the Faculty of Medicine at King Abdul Aziz University, a member of the medical team, said that the patent related to the nano-emulsion drug that greatly activate weak heart and blood vessels associated with the food assimilation syndrome.
“We started working on the idea three years ago, and we worked initially on experimental animals and then the last stage was testing the nano-based drug on humans,” professor Azhar said.
He added the idea was how to make a drug that strengthens the cardiac muscle and make the heart pump more effectively.
“Before we started experiments on animals, animals were made to become overweight and exposed to certain food assimilation diseases to weaken their heart muscle, and increase blood pressure in their arteries. On applying the drug to the animals, we found after several tests, that it improved the cardiac muscle, bettered blood flow and decreased the blood pressure.
Cardiovascular diseases represent the first cause of morbidity in Western countries, and, although in recent years substantial strides have been made in treatment strategies, mortality still remains high.
In particular, chronic heart failure (CHF) is highly prevalent in the general population worldwide, reaching more than 20 per cent in individuals aged above 80 years representing a significant health care burden. It is commonly the end stage in the cardiovascular disease (CVD) continuum, mainly due to coronary heart disease and hypertension. The outcomes for CHF still remain poor and only few patients access the gold standard treatment and heart transplantation.
In the last decade, medical research has focused its efforts on the attempt of finding new possible strategies for the treatment of CHF. Several approaches have been tried and have shown promising preliminary results.
Among these, the regenerative hypothesis and stem cells have gained credits especially after the setup of protocols to reprogram cellular fate to definite phenotypes suitable for regenerative purposes. Nevertheless, the use of integrative viruses, frequently adopted in many reprogramming approaches, generates concern mostly related to their association with the risk of gene damage and neoplastic transformation.
