“Once you reach this stage of heart disease, you don’t get better.
You can go down slowly, or go down quickly…
… but you’re going to go down.”
These were the grim words of Dr. Roberto Bolli regarding patients like 39-year-old Ken M. in 2009.
Following a massive heart attack, one-third of Ken’s heart tissue was destroyed resulting in what conventional medicine could only consider at the time to be “irreversible cardiovascular damage.”
As far as Ken was concerned, he would never get better. This condition would affect him for the rest of his life, and sooner or later, his heart would fail, and he would die.
It’s a sad story, but it’s certainly not something we’re unaccustomed to.
Heart disease kills upward of 600,000 Americans each year and accounts for nearly one out of every three deaths within our borders. If there was ever an epidemic in this country, this is it.
Yet for some reason or another, the American public would rather gripe over gun control as if that’s what’s really plaguing our nation. Personally, I don’t get it… but perhaps medical issues just aren’t media worthy.
Or maybe heart disease has simply become so common that we’ve begun to accept it as an inevitable part of our lives. We bow our heads when doctors throw out words like “irreversible,” when that’s not at all the reality of the situation.
The truth of the matter is there’s no such thing as irreversible heart disease — at least, not anymore.
Healing the Heart
If biology bores you at all, you’re going to have to grit your teeth here for second — there’s a significant moneymaking opportunity to make it worth your while.
When you suffer from a heart attack, your coronary blood flow and oxygen are restricted, causing a condition known as myocardial infarction. If an attack is severe enough, this infarct region causes damage to surrounding heart muscle, reducing its ability to pump efficiently.
The result is a snowball effect: decreased blood flow causes muscle cells to die, which causes a further decrease in blood flow, continuing the cycle. This effect is known as ischemia, and it expands outward over time depending on the initial severity of damage.
Stents are used as temporary methods of opening arteries to increase blood flow, but that’s about as far as conventional medicine takes us. In modern practice, infarct regions do not shrink — they continue to expand until the day you die.
But more recently Dr. Bolli, as well as researchers at one of the most respected medical centers in Los Angeles have released groundbreaking studies showing that damaged heart tissue can, in fact, be repaired.
Ken M. (the man with “irreversible heart damage”) and 16 other participants with similar conditions underwent a cutting-edge treatment for about four months and saw a reduction in scar tissue between 30% and 47%. But scar tissue didn’t just retreat — patients were actually able to regrow new cells.
The medical community was dumbfounded.
On average, these patients were able to grow about 600 million new heart cells. During a major heart attack, you lose about 1 billion.
The implications of such treatments are incredibly profound and will revolutionize the way we treat cardiovascular disease — one of the largest medical markets in the United States.
Coming of Age
As for the means used to accomplish this feat, we can only thank stem cell research.
Since scientists first derived stem cells from animal models in 1981 we’ve come quite a long way.
Once an unfamiliar and controversial subset of science, stem cell therapy has rapidly matured into a pragmatic and widely accepted form of medicine. In just a few decades, we’ve graduated from the surreal practice of growing human ears on the backs of mice to an age of both practical and ethical applications.
To clear up any potential ethical dilemmas, no longer do we rely on the destruction of embryos to derive cells; rather, we can use our own adult bodies.
In the study described above, scientists extracted stem cells from patients’ own hearts to be grown in a lab and implanted at a later date. The procedure is painless, but Milles also described it as unsettling. During extraction, he could feel the surgeon poking around his heart.
To avoid this, researchers from one publicly traded microcap have devised a way to accomplish a similar effect with stem cells derived from bone marrow — a far less invasive (and equally promising) method of reversing ischemia.
This treatment is so groundbreaking that it has even received a $1 million investment from the Vatican, which is why it’s being hailed by industry experts as the “Papal Cure.”
As for efficacy, Phase I/II data is looking incredibly promising.
The “Papal Cure” mitigated blood flow decrease by as much as 36.4% and completely shut down any deceases in left ventricle function — a standard measure for heart strength.
In other words, zero patients showed a decrease in the volume of blood ejected from the heart following treatment.
Additionally, the study showed a reduction in infarct area size by 10%-15% at full dose — and the greater the dose, the greater the impact:
To date, there’s only been one stem cell therapy approved for commercialization, which is why this market floundered after a massive bull market in the early 2000s.
Today, the landscape is entirely different. The science has drastically advanced, and federal regulations have been lifted and denied in the United States and Europe, respectively.
Quite simply, we’re on the cusp of a new bull market for stem cells, and the company described above is without a doubt our number one play.
Turning progress to profits,
Jason Stutman
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