Very important article in todays' NYT;
FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY;
Two Studies Find That Heart Injections
Offer Lasting Relief From Angina
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
Two small studies have shown that over the course of just a few weeks, one dose of experimental drugs injected directly into the heart can greatly relieve, or even eliminate, the chest pain of coronary artery disease by encouraging the growth of new blood vessels to bypass clogged arteries, according to researchers in the United States and Germany.
The research is at a preliminary stage, and the drugs have yet to be tested in large groups of people. Even if the results hold up, it may be years before any therapy is available for patients who suffer fom such chest pain, or angina. One of the treatments under study is gene therapy to produce a protein called vegF, for vascular endothelial growth factor. The other entails injection of a protein called FGF-1, for fibroblast growth factor.
Each drug is given in a single injection, through a surgical incision in the chest. In effect, both treatments aim to allow patients to grow their own heart bypasses by sprouting thin "collateral" blood vessels, in a strategy called therapeutic angiogenesis.
The same gene therapy as is involved in one of these treatments has been shown to be effective in building new blood vessels in the legs, but these reports are the first to assert that gene therapy has produced new vessels in the heart.
The coronary gene therapy research, led by Dr. Jeffrey M. Isner of St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Brighton, Mass., and Tufts University, is reported in today's issue of Circulation, a journal published by the American Heart Association. The protein therapy is being developed by Dr. Thomas-Joseph Stegmann of Fulda, Germany, a leading figure in the field.
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Copywrie NYT 12/22/98
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