ABSTRACT

Despite advances in revascularization techniques, acute myocardial infarction (AMI) still carries significant morbidity and mortality. Over the past decade, the use of regenerative medicine methodologies, and specifically bone marrow derived progenitor cell therapy has been tested in more than 35 Phase I and Phase II clinical studies demonstrating overall safety and measurable clinical benefit, 12–61 months post-treatment as evaluated by improvement in the Left Ventricular Ejection Fraction (LVEF) and changes in infarct size post AMI. Recent meta-analysis on the subject highlighted several important parameters that include timing of the cell therapy post AMI, the cell dose, and the baseline LVEF on enrollment. We further postulate that the mythologies and timing for cell handling and delivery including the specific devices are essential for clinical efficacy. Addressing this we have developed a rapid 60 to 90 minute process and integrated system which is carried out in the heart catheter lab, using a combination product (U.S. Food and Drug broadly defined as the combination of co-labeled optimized “cell friendly” devices, effective cell/biological formulation and dose) for harvesting, pro- cessing, verifying, and delivering an autologous dose of bone marrow progenitor/stem cells via the intracoronary artery proximal to the infarct myocardial region. The methodology has been demonstrated to be safe and feasible for autologous in vivo use and presented by our groups' earlier studies1–3 and most recently used in a Phase Ib critical limb ischemia trial of 17 subjects (NCT01472289) (manuscript under preparation). This is the first case study prior to beginning the AMIRST trial [Acute Myocardial Infarction Rapid Stem cell Therapy], specific to our proprietary combination product kit for acute myocardial infarction, and was completed under the Indepen- dent Ethics Committee and Institutional Committee for Stem Cell Research and Therapy approval (TIEC/2011/32/ 02) for process and safety endpoints post-treatment.

Keywords: Acute myocardial infarction AMIRST clinical trial Cellular therapy Intracoronary cell delivery Point-of-care STEMI