(4/23/99)
Heart researchers may soon be able to turn a vessel into an artery by
simply washing it with a genetic preparation.
In bypass surgeries, the procedure could finally give the heart what it
really needs.
Science Specialist Ed Yeates has more on the story.
One major obstacle in heart bypass surgery is that doctors try to
transplant thin-walled vessels - say from the leg - to feed the heart as an
artery should.
But what if you could give these smaller pipelines a genetic command
sort of saying you're no longer just a vessel - but a major artery.
Dr. Gordon Williams, M.D., of Harvard Medical School, says, "What you want to
do is to put into that vessel before you put it into the heart or the leg or
wherever the graft needs to be put - you want to put into it genetic
manipulations which turn off the genes which try to make it overgrow."
If the vessel doesn't overgrow, it becomes bigger, stronger and able to
withstand more blood volume and pressure.
The conversion is a variation of angiogenesis - the same process
researchers have used in animals to shut down blood vessel growth to cancer
cells.
Much further down the road, scientists would like to reverse the
process and make vessels regenerate and grow towards the heart - possibly
eliminating the need for bypasses.
But Williams says turning vessel growth ON will prove more difficult
than turning them OFF.
"The difficulty is how do you not turn it on elsewhere and how do you turn it
off when it has reached the point when you don't want it to do it anymore."
Dr. Gordon Williams from Harvard was one of several national researchers
attending scientific sessions in Salt Lake honoring the late Roger Williams.
Dr. Roger Williams, who was also breaking new ground in heart research, was
killed in a plane crash last year.
All the researchers attending the symposium were colleagues of Roger
Williams and had worked or collaborated with him before his death.
