Researchers find heart muscle ‘sells the family silver’

Posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

UTHealth researchers have discovered that heart muscle cells eat their own proteins in order to stay alive.

The original research paper by Kedryn Baskin, a student in the Program of Integrative and Regulatory Biology of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and Heinrich Taegtmeyer, M.D., UT Physicians cardiologist, was recently published in Circulation Research, a publication of the American Heart Association.

In animal models, the investigators found that a stressed heart activates a signal, which takes down unneeded proteins. This process, in turn, makes it possible for the cell to survive and rebuild itself.

“We believe we are beginning to understand a whole new chapter in the biology of the heart—self-renewal of the cardiomyocytes. It’s like the heart muscle selling its family silver to stay alive,” Dr. Taegtmeyer says.

His lab is now working on other mechanisms by which the heart takes down old and useless proteins and replaces them with new and functional ones. If successful, the work will lead to new ways to treat heart failure, a disease that claims the lives of 500,000 Americans each year.

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