The groundbreaking new heart procedure is facilitated by Amit Patel, the hospital’s director of clinical regenerative medicine and tissue engineering.
The procedure, which is the first of its kind, uses minimally invasive technology to perform an outpatient surgery on patients who experience heart failure — a condition that affects more than 20 million people worldwide.
“Those with heart failure have limited options,” Patel said. “They can get an artificial heart or a transplant, both of which are few and far between, very expensive and have many risks.”
The operation is called “retroactive gene therapy,” and uses unique treatment methods, described by Patel as “100 percent human DNA,” in order to attract stem cells to the heart, which help to strengthen it and make it pump stronger. Although Patel developed the treatment himself, he says that the idea of using gene therapy has been in talks among the medical community for years.
“People have been talking about this for 50 years,” he said. “Ten years ago we tried it on animals and then we really started thinking about using it on humans.”
One of the most innovative components to the procedure is the way in which the surgical team reaches the heart. Often, in heart surgeries, doctors put catheters in main arteries in the heart, which can break down muscle that is already weak because of failure. Patel’s technique instead goes backwards through the patient’s main cardiac vein, and inflates a balloon to block blood flow out of the heart. This allows the patient to get a direct, high dose of gene therapy. Following the procedure, patients are generally kept overnight for observation.
The first experimental gene therapy procedure was done on Nov. 7 on 66-year-old Ernie Lively of Heber, who is the father of actress Blake Lively and a veteran actor himself. When Lively moved to Utah after retiring, he was hoping to enjoy the outdoor weather and the snow, but instead found himself inhibited by his increasingly intense heart problems. In a statement provided by the U, Lively says that the change in his energy after the operation was immediately noticeable.
“I woke up this morning and told my wife, ‘I haven’t felt this good in years,’ ” Lively said.
Aside from its use for outdoor recreation, Lively says that he also plans to take advantage of his newly rejuvenated heart by traveling and spending time with his grandchildren.
Since Lively’s operation, doctors at the U have performed the gene therapy procedure on four other patients. Anwar Tandar, a member of Patel’s surgical team, is optimistic about the treatment, which will go through a trial of 72 patients before it becomes available to the general public.
“We need more time to look at it, but objectively [Lively] is doing well,” Tandar said. “He is doing better. This isn’t a complicated procedure and I feel like it can do a lot of good.”