A single dose of self-amplified RNA can repair tissue damage caused by a heart attack, a new study in pigs and mice shows.
It can take weeks or months to recover from a heart attack, but the new study explored a new way to boost the production of a natural heart-repairing hormone with a single injection. Although the vaccine has not yet been tested in humans, researchers believe it could one day offer hope for a faster recovery.
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A heart attack It is often caused by a blocked artery that prevents oxygen-rich blood from reaching the heart muscle. While surgery can remove the blockage, the heart muscle itself also needs to recover from the lack of oxygen. If it does not heal quickly enough, Scar tissue It will displace it, which is less effective at pumping blood and may lead to heart failure.
”My heart disease “It is still the number one killer in the United States,” he said. I qingA biomedical engineer at Columbia University and lead author of the new study. Repairing heart muscle cells after a heart attack can reduce the risk of death from heart failure, but it comes with a challenge. “It is very difficult to deliver drugs to the heart without surgical procedures,” Cheng told Live Science.
In the study, Published March 5 in the journal ScienceCheng and his collaborators showed that a single injection of self-amplifying RNA (saRNA) into the muscle tissue of the hind leg can heal cardiomyocytes in mice and pigs by increasing levels of a hormone called atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP).
By studying mice, researchers discovered that ANP levels were much higher in newborns than in adults, a difference they attributed to ANP playing a role in heart development. This inspired Cheng and colleagues to see if it was possible to temporarily increase ANP levels in adult mice to help heal the heart. “We wanted to see if we could supplement ANP with self-amplifying RNA,” Cheng said.
When injected, sarna instructs muscle tissue to produce a molecule called proANP, which enters the bloodstream and turns into ANP once it reaches the heart.
The mechanism is similar to how mRNA vaccines a job. Like mRNA, saRNA includes the instructions needed to make a protein. Both mRNA and saRNA degrade within a few days, but saRNA directs the cell to make more copies of itself so it can continue to regenerate and produce protein For about four weeks.
The first saRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine has been approved for use Japan and EuropeBut Sarna has not been used to treat heart disease before.
“I think this is the perfect use of Sarna,” he said. Anna BlakeneyA biomedical engineer at the University of British Columbia who studies Sarna but was not involved in the research. She noted that mRNA is not suitable for such studies because it disappears very quickly. This is enough for vaccines to activate the immune system, but for applications that need larger amounts of protein, sarna works better.
Although this new method of increasing ANP has not been tested in humans, it helps heart cells recover in mice and pigs. Since saRNA is actually a longer form of mRNA, it uses the same delivery system as the COVID-19 vaccines, which bodes well for the safety of the injection itself. However, future studies will still need to determine the safe and effective dose of ANP in humans.
“We don’t know exactly what mechanism would benefit patients,” he said. Doctor and perfumer, Professor of Cardiology at Oslo University Hospital who was not involved in the study. He noted that previous studies treating heart attack patients with natriuretic peptides (such as ANP) did not aid recovery, so this new delivery method will need to be proven in clinical trials.
More research is still needed for this potential treatment, including trials to confirm the mechanism, test the safety of the injection, and monitor its effects. But if it goes beyond these steps, it could provide a promising way to heal the heart after a heart attack.
Zhang, K., Tao, H., Zhu, D., Yue, Z., Hu, S., Wu, Y., Yan, N., Hu, Y., Liu, S., Liu, M., Vahl, T. P., Ranard, L. S., Cheng, X., Romanov, A., Liu, J., Zhang, S. W., Y., Li C., Lu, M., Shen. . . Cheng, K. (2026). Single intramuscular injection of autologous Nppa-amplified RNA for the treatment of myocardial infarction. Science, 391(6789), edau9394.
