By Oryana Kaufman

Haifa----August 2.....On Israel's medical front, breakthrough research is continuing to save lives.

Recent discoveries could offer long-term answers to two of the biggest
life-threatening diseases in the world, leading towards a treatment for patients with heart failure or diabetes.

Dr. Lior Gepstein and Dr. Itzhak Kehat from Technion Rappaport Faculty of
Medicine and Rambam Hospital, succeeded in growing the precursors of heart cells from embryonic stems cells, and based on extensive tests, are convinced that these cells are cardiomyocytes, the cells that form the heart muscle. They are the first in the world ever to grow these cells.

“We used a number of different tests - genetic, electrical, protein and chemical - to determine if these were really cardiomyocytes,” explains Gepstein. The cells passed with flying colors and he says that it seems likely that if placed in an adult human heart, these cells would produce mature human heart muscles.

“We know that embryonic stem cells can differentiate into all the tissues of the
body, while a given type of adult stem cells seem to differentiate only into a small set of tissue types,” Dr. Gepstein says. As a result, the techniques that the Technion group has developed could be modified to produce other types of human tissue.

Meanwhile, Prof. Karl Skorecki also of the Technion Rappaport Faculty of
Medicine, today had his findings, that human embryonic stem cells can produce insulin, published in the prestigious scientific journal Diabetes.

His work provides an initial step towards a future cell-therapy approach to cure patients with diabetes mellitus (juvenile-onset diabetes).

Presently Skorecki is working on generating beta cells, which are found in the
pancreas and are responsible for producing the body’s insulin and regulating blood sugar levels. In juvenile diabetes the body attacks these beta cells, destroying them so that insulin production is no longer controlled, he says.

“Currently there are two ways to treat this,” Skorecki says, “either by a Pancreas Transplant or an Islet Transplant however both are expensive, dangerous and logistically not viable due to the sheer amount of diabetes patients.”

Both of the recent breakthroughs were based on the work of Prof. Joseph
Itskovitz-Eldor, a medical faculty colleague and director of obstetrics and
gynecology at Rambam, who three years ago helped isolate a line of human
embryonic stem cells in pioneering work three years ago.

Gepstein says he doesn’t know how long the discovery will take until it will be
applied on heart patients, “but the demand is great, and this field will push ahead rapidly,” he says.

With the same dedication Skorecki also is ready for the challenge that lies ahead.