Traditional medicine could slow heart disease development. Time halted during the European Football Championship last summer. When football player Christian Eriksen unexpectedly fell, passed away, and was resuscitated on live television, the buzzing anxiety that had filled the air vanished in a mat
The researchers searched for a molecule that could slow disease progression — and they may have found it.Time halted during the European Football Championship last summer. When football player Christian Eriksen unexpectedly fell, passed away, and was resuscitated on live television, the buzzing anxiety that had filled the air vanished in a matter of seconds.
“We have identified a previously unknown disease mechanism in ARVC, which adds a completely new layer of information that no one knew about,” she says. Alicia Lundby and her colleagues studied heart biopsies from healthy individuals and from patients suffering from hereditary ARVC. They performed a deep and so-called molecular profiling of the heart samples and identified the molecular differences between the hearts. Based on these measurements, they formulated hypotheses about the causes of the disease and tested them on mice models and stem cell-derived heart muscle cells.
“When we tested honokiol on our mouse model, it really did slow down the development of the disease. The same happened in our stem cell-derived heart cells. We do not know if it works the same with humans, but the fact that we can confirm the effect in two different models makes it very interesting,” says Alicia Lundby.