IT Home, Aug. 21 News: According to Central TV News today, the heart beats continuously every day, inseparable from the coronary artery, this “highway” that transports oxygen and nutrients. Once the coronary artery is blocked, the downstream cardiac muscle will be damaged or even necrotic. But in some people, the heart itself has a set of “backup plans”—side arteries. They are like emergency bridges built naturally, able to bypass blocked areas and restore blood supply. Where do these “life bridges” come from? In the past, the scientific community believed that some side arteries could be regenerated, they stemmed from the “migration and reorganization” of existing arteries.
Zhou Bin‘s research team at the Center for Excellence in Molecular Cellular Science (Institute of Biochemistry and Cellular Biology) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences revealed that the real “builders” of regenerating lateral arteries are not existing arteries, but the capillaries that pervade the cardiac muscle. The results were published in the international academic journal Science on August 21.
It is known that the research team used cytogenetics technology to design a “cell contact history recorder” capable of permanently recording actual arterial endothelial cells, and established a high-precision tracking system using dual-group enzymes to specifically capture arteries from capillary transformation. The research found that capillaries rapidly expand when arteries are blocked, acquiring the structure and function of arteries, and resupplying blood and nutrients to the damaged cardiac muscle. Further research found that the VEGFA molecule plays an important role in this change. In animal experiments, when the level of VEGFA in the damaged heart was briefly increased, the efficiency of capillary transformation to arteries was significantly improved, the area of cardiac ischemia in mice was reduced, and cardiac function was improved.
IT House learned from the report that this study has refreshed people‘s understanding of the heart’s self-healing ability and provided new ideas for the treatment of coronary artery disease.