A hospital in Japan has carried out the world's first surgery using sheets of commercially available heart muscle stem cells after the ground-breaking therapy was approved this year, one of the surgeons said.
Sheets of muscle cells derived from regenerative products known as induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, were transplanted into the heart of a woman in her 50s during the hour-long surgery.
It marked the first clinical use of the regenerative therapy since it received conditional government approval in March.
"Our hope is that this will improve the patient's quality of life," surgeon Yoshiki Sawa, the head of Osaka Keisatsu Hospital, said after the surgery.
Trials of the regenerative therapy were conducted on eight patients suffering from ischemic heart disease — damage caused by narrowed heart arteries.
