WAUWATOSA, Wis. — February is American Heart Month. It is a time when people can focus on their cardiovascular health and ways to adopt healthy lifestyles to prevent heart disease.
Scientists at the Medical College of Wisconsin are trying to figure out how to fix a broken heart. They are trying to unlock a way to grow back heart muscles after a heart attack.
In this report, we share the run/walk in Wauwatosa, which is helping fund this research.
This all began when the founder of the Steve Cullen Healthy Heart Club Run Walk lost her husband, Steve Cullen, to cardiac arrest. This was only days after he ran the Milwaukee Marathon.
More than 20 years later, her heartbreak is helping mend others, after creating a fund to further research.
Gael Cullen recalls her husband was, "40 years old and away on a business trip, and he basically went to bed and never woke up."
This is why all of the money raised for their Cullen Run/Walk this year, will be devoted to saving others.
Caitlin O'Meara and her team of scientists at the Medical College of Wisconsin are grateful.
She just received $50,000 from The Cullen Run/Walk to find a way to regenerate heart tissue, after a severe heart attack.
O'Meara explained heart attack damage comes from a lack of oxygen and blood flow. The heart she was showing in her study was not from a human. She is studying mice.
You see, there is something special about this species: newborn mice can completely repair their heart after a severe heart attack.
We asked her: What do you think they have that we don't?
O'Meara answered, "The difference in how the cardiac muscles themselves can divide into two cells."
Meaning, a newborn mouse's heart can heal itself from a severe injury. But by a week old, O'Meara says mice lose that ability.
"That is specifically what we're trying to understand is why newborn heart muscle cells have that ability to divide."
They are also studying zebrafish. O'Meara says they have the ability to grow back their hearts for life.
"You can clip off like 10 to 15 percent of the heart and it will fully grow back within one to two months!"
The indestructible fish found in pet stores has a life span of about three years. So, not every part of this fish can regenerate. O'Meara hopes it holds the key to unlocking how to replicate this in humans.
"With the Cullen Fund, one angle we're looking at is what's preventing those cardiac muscle cells from being able to divide?"
Getting to the answer to that question could take decades. But O'Meara believes she is getting close by using certain proteins.
Her research is in the early stages and has not touched a human yet. She believes we are still decades off from fully generating a person's heart, but creating hospital therapies could come sooner, "Months to years, something might hit the clinics."
She says this could be a game-changer for a person who has suffered a severe heart attack.
"There aren't any clinically approved therapies to improve heart muscle tissue so this is a relatively new and cutting-edge field."
The Steve Cullen Healthy Heart Club Run/Walk is taking place Saturday, Feb. 11. 100 percent of the money raised will go to the Medical College of Wisconsin's heart-related research.
