Since its establishment in 2015, Heartseed has been conducting its research and development to realize cardiac regenerative therapy as soon as possible, with the mission of  “Open the door for cardiovascular disease treatment with regenerative medicine”.

Heart failure is a disease caused by necrosis of heart tissue due to a myocardial infarction and the like, resulting in a decrease in heart pump function. The number of patients is 1.3 million in Japan and 5 million in the United States. Heart tissue that has been lost cannot be recovered, and only heart transplantation has the potential for cure. However, the reality is that there is a shortage of heart donors and sufficient treatment has not been delivered.

For that heart failure, we are developing a therapeutic method to generate cardiomyocytes from iPS cells and transplant them into cardiac tissue. Since I first reported in the world that cardiomyocytes can be generated from bone marrow stromal cells in 1995, many clinical studies have been conducted to administer mesenchymal cells, but all have achieved insufficient effects. From then back on, based on the idea that the only way to treat heart failure effectively is to make and transplant a large number of cardiomyocytes, always keeping in mind the safety and merits of patients and the industrialization of regenerative medicine, we have been conducting research on cardiac regenerative medicine using ES and iPS cells.