Mt Sinai has teamed up with a gene therapy company to test an inhaled treatment for pulmonary hypertension, the hospital system reports.
PH is a rare (15-50 cases per million people), rapidly progressing disease that occurs when blood pressure is too high in vessels leading from the heart to the lungs. The high pressure is caused by abnormal remodeling of the lung blood vessels, characterized by a proliferation of smooth muscle cells and a thickening and narrowing of these vessels, and can lead to failure of the right ventricle of the heart and premature death.
Abnormalities in calcium cycling within the vascular cells play a key role in the pathophysiology of pulmonary hypertension, along with deficiencies in the sarcoplasmic reticulum calcium ATPase pump (SERCA2a) protein which regulates intracellular calcium within these vascular cells and prevents them from proliferating within the vessel wall. Downregulation of SERCA2a leads to the proliferative remodeling of the vasculature. This gene therapy, delivered via an inhaled aerosolized spray, aims to increase the expression of SERCA2a protein, and has been shown in rodents and pigs to improve heart and lung function, as well as reduce and even reverse cellular changes caused by PH.
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