Acute Myocardial Infarction, Cardioprotection, and Muse Cells

Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) is a common cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Severe MI leads to heart failure due to a marked loss of functional cardiomyocytes. First-line treatment for AMI is to reperfuse the occluded coronary artery by PCI as soon as possible. Besides PCI, there are several therapies to reduce the infarct size and improve the cardiac function and remodeling. These are drug therapies such as pharmacological pre- and postconditioning, cytokine therapies, and stem cell therapies. None of these therapies have been clinically developed as a standard treatment for AMI. Among many cell sources for stem cell therapies, the Muse cell is an endogenous non-tumorigenic pluripotent stem cell, which is able to differentiate into cells of all three germ layers from a single cell, suggesting that the Muse cell is a potential cell source for regenerative medicine. Endogenous Muse cell dynamics in the acute phase plays an important role in the prognosis of AMI patients; AMI patients with a higher number of Muse cells in the peripheral blood in the acute phase show more favorable improvement of the cardiac function and remodeling in the chronic phase, suggesting their innate reparative function for the heart. Intravenously administered exogenous Muse cells engrafted preferentially and efficiently to infarct border areas via the S1P-S1PR2 axis and differentiated spontaneously into working cardiomyocytes and vessels, showed paracrine effects, markedly reduced the myocardial infarct size, and delivered long-lasting improvement of the cardiac function and remodeling for 6 months. These findings suggest that Muse cells are reparative stem cells, and thus their clinical application is warranted.