Heart surgeons at The Christ Hospital Thursday performed a heart-repair procedure on a 71-year-old Middletown man as part of clinical trials that could offer a new life-extending alternative to heart drugs and transplants. Surgeons Donald Mitts and Thomas Ivey injected muscle stem cells from patient Charles Emmerick's thigh into his heart tissue damaged from a prior heart attack. Researchers hope the skeletal muscle cells will graft themselves into the heart tissue and begin contracting to assist the pumping power of the patient's scarred heart.

Emmerick is the first of up to 10 patients nationwide who will receive the experimental injections. Dr. Dean J. Kereiakes, medical director of The Lindner Center for Research and Education, is principal investigator for the study. "The implications of this process and study are immense," he said.

About 4.6 million Americans have heart failure, with about 550,000 new cases diagnosed each year. If the muscle cell injections work, thousands of people with heart failure could benefit from a treatment that would be cheaper than heart transplants, offer much shorter waiting lists and not require living on anti-rejection drugs, since the muscle stem cells come from the patient's own body.

Doctors weeks ago removed a golf-ball-sized plug of skeletal muscle tissue from Emmerick's thigh and sent it to Diacrin, a Charlestown, Mass. company that specializes in cell transplant technologies. Diacrin grew more than 300 million cells in a lab dish for about three weeks, spent another two weeks purifying them, then returned them to Cincinnati. At Christ Hospital, Drs. Mitts and Ivey performed open heart surgery to complete a second bypass and insert the healthy muscle cells into Emmerick's scarred heart tissue. Kereiakes, Mitts and Ivey are members of the Ohio Heart Health Center, Ohio's largest cardiovascular physicians group.

The technology is so new researchers aren't sure which cells will work best. Stem cells from the patient's bone marrow could transform into actual heart muscle cells and might function better. The new alternative holds out additional hope for any who face life-threatening congestive heart failure.