His name is Massimo Caputo and he is an Italian cardiac surgeon and researcher at the Bristol Heart Institute, a pioneer in the use of allogeneic stem cells for the correction of congenital heart defects.
Professeur Massimo Caputo du Bristol Heart Institute / British Heart Foundation
There are stories that literally touch the heart, like that of little Finley, a child from Corsham, in the English county of Wiltshire, who was born with transposition of the great arteries, a serious congenital heart condition in which the pulmonary artery and the he aorta comes from the “bad” ventricle due to an error during the formation of the heart: the aorta is connected to the right ventricle and the pulmonary to the left ventricle, exactly the opposite of a normal heart. Therefore, blood returning from the lungs does not go into the systemic circulation, but returns to the lungs themselves, along with systemic venous blood, which is redirected into the same circulation, bypassing the lungs.
As an abnormality incompatible with life, Finley underwent his first open-heart surgery at the Bristol Royal Hospital for Children just four days following his birth, but the presence of an additional condition, a rare birth defect involving the incomplete development of the coronary arteries, worsened his clinical picture. ” We knew from the start that the chances of him surviving weren’t good – he told the Bbc Finley’s mother, Melissa – . After 12 hours, he was finally released from the operating room, but he needed heart and lung bypass surgery to stay alive, and his heart function deteriorated significantly.”.
Stem cells to correct birth defects of the heart
After weeks of medication and intensive care, when it seemed there were no other possible cures, a new procedure was attempted using stem cells grown in a placenta bank by scientists from the Royal Free Hospital in London. The pioneer of this technique for correcting congenital heart defects is the Italian cardiologist and researcher Massimo Caputo of the Bristol Heart Institute who, still at the Bbc he explained that he “He probably saved my life of the child, accomplishing what might be the world’s first operationusing cord blood stem cells.
In a recent interview for the British Heart Foundation, Professor Caputo said one of his research priorities was the use of stem cells to prevent repeat operations in newborn babies and children with congenital heart disease. “Every time you do heart surgery on the same person, it gets more risky. Even though we are now doing well in terms of survival, there is always a risk of complications – infections, brain or lung damage – which can affect long-term quality of life. And there is also the psychological cost of repeated surgerysaid the heart surgeon, speaking regarding the long-term risks of traditional surgeries.
In contrast, the procedure attempted with Finley, a revolutionary stem cell “scaffold,” relied on the infusion of so-called “allogeneic” stem cells into heart muscle, in the hope that they would promote regeneration of coronary arteries. . These cells have the ability to grow into tissue and, in Finley’s case, corrected the birth defect in his heart. ” We weaned him off all his meds and stopped the ventilator – added Professor Caputo -. He was released from the intensive care unit and is now, now two, a happy little boy growing up”.
Together with his research team, Professor Caputo hopes that the method will be able to help all people suffering from congenital heart disease in the future and that experiments with blood vessels made from stem cells might start within a few years. ” We’re trying to create living tissue, whether it’s a valve, a blood vessel or a patch, that grows with the baby and doesn’t deteriorate. I think it would change their quality of life enormously. »