Treating heart attacks with a sprayable gel containing repair factors

Associate Professor Giselle Yeo, University of Sydney

Vanguard Grant

Years funded: 2026 - 2028

Heart attacks are the main cause of death worldwide and in Australia. They are caused by the blockage of arteries that supply blood to the heart, which cuts off oxygen and can lead to heart damage or failure. The standard treatment for heart attacks is to restore oxygen supply to the heart, but this approach cannot replace or repair the damaged tissue. More effective treatments that can encourage the damaged heart to heal are urgently needed.

In recent years, an emerging treatment that holds promise for heart attacks is the use of bioactive factors produced by regenerative cells called mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs). These factors, called the secretome, have beneficial properties that prevent cell death, stimulate new blood vessel formation, reduce scarring, and lower inflammation, which can collectively improve heart function after a heart attack. Nevertheless, secretome-based treatments pose barriers that can lead to inconsistent patient outcomes. These issues include the variable effectiveness of the harvested secretome, and the difficulty of delivering and keeping the secretome within the damaged heart region.

Our team has several innovations that we believe can address these key issues of secretome therapy. First, to ensure that the harvested secretomes are consistently and strongly effective, we will select only MSCs that have a strong regenerative signature, using new markers that we have recently identified from next-generation sequencing studies. We will treat the selected MSCs with a natural protein abundant in young cells, based on our discovery that this protein can protect the cells from premature ageing, and enhance the quality of the harvested secretome. We will then mix the secretome into a gel, which can be sprayed directly on the damaged heart, and held in place simply by shining light on the gel. We can customise these gels to release the secretome over different periods of time. We will test the effectiveness of the secretome-containing gels in a mouse heart attack model, in order to answer important questions, such as: Should the secretome be released quickly or slowly for the best outcome? Can secretomes extend the ‘golden window’ for treating heart attacks, which is currently a short two hours?

If successful, our approach will make secretome therapies a highly feasible and more effective treatment for heart attacks compared to current standards, with the potential to preserve heart function by minimising tissue damage and boosting the repair of injured tissues.