One of the most fundamental issues in heart research is the inability of the heart cells to divide or replicate and make new cells. Therefore after a heart attack there are very few options other than surgery, left to mitigate further damage and just one option really to totally repair the problem should the damage be too severe: a heart transplant.

Unlike our skin cells, which readily heal by stitching together wounds with new, healthy cells, heart muscle cells largely lose their ability to replicate early in life (instead, they progress through the cell cycle but, in most cases, they do not actually divide). As a result, polyploidization and multinucleation occur. In order to get a deeper understanding of the mechanisms surrounding division of heart cells there is a crucial need for a technique to isolate heart cells that complete cell division/cytokinesis.

The holy grail of cardiac research is to harness the heart’s regenerative potential to fix damage related to heart attack and heart failure. There is very little if any regenerative capacity remaining in adult heart cells. Further, there is no reliable gold standard tools and techniques available for the identification of cardiac replication.

In a new development, scientists have devised a technique to sort out which heart cells can replicate and which cannot, a critical step toward treatments that may one day help the heart heal itself after injury. The method, published in the journal Circulation Research, removes a significant roadblock to developing ways to regrow healthy cardiac muscle tissue, a feat not currently possible.

The new method combines two technologies — molecular beacon technology and fluorescence activated cell-sorting — to specifically isolate cells that successfully divide. This will allow scientists to determine the mechanisms underlying heart muscle cells’ regenerative potential, which is critical to the development of regenerative strategies aimed to cure patients with heart injury. This study demonstrates a novel alternative to existing DNA content-based approaches for sorting heart cells with true mitotic(cell division) potential that can be used to study the unique dynamics of heart cell nuclei during mitosis.

This study is promising because now if we can accurately identify regenerating or dividing heart cells, we can start to determine the mechanisms that allow them to divide and develop ways to jump-start this process and perhaps change the science scape of heart regeneration.