First Human Heart Stem Cell Trial Shows Promise

(Updated) For the first time, doctors were able to improve heart function and reverse tissue damage in heart failure patients, using stem cells taken from the patients' own heart tissue.
Experts hailed the findings, which were simultaneously published on Monday in the journal The

Lancet and presented at the American Heart Association's annual meeting in Orlando, as potentially groundbreaking. "Every once in a while there's a landmark study in medicine," Dr. Josh Hare, chief of cardiology and director of the Interdisciplinary Stem Cell Institute at University of Miami, told ABC News. "I think this is a landmark in medicine. It reaches the level of when the first heart transplant was done."

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