uses of stem cells

- they said roman hadhypoplastic left heart syndrome and the best thing that we could do would be to take him home and in probably about three or four days, he'dpass away on his own. i was 25 weeks pregnantwhen we went back home just absolutely devastatedand we decided to come to mayo and they gave us hope. (inspirational music) - the focus of this initialtrial is on the diagnosis of

hypoplastic left heart syndromeand that is a congenital heart defect where half of theheart is not really formed. now the ventricle that the childis left with is a ventricle that now has a muchbigger responsibility than what it was initiallydesigned for and so over time, the function of this ventriclegradually can get reduced to the point that the child,or maybe a young adult, will start to developsymptoms of heart failure. once the function ofthe ventricle goes down,

we don't have anythingthat we can do for that. stem cell therapy hasthe ability to improve the function of any of theseventricles that are failing. whether it be a child,whether it be an adult, whether it be a congenital defect, whether it be an adult defect. - the study here at mayo clinic with hypoplastic left heartchildren is really the first fda approved clinicaltrial using stem cells

to try to regenerate and curecongenital heart disease. the study is really designedto identify children with this disease before they're born, collect umbilical cord bloodat the time of their birth. these children typicallyneed three surgeries. first starting in thefirst few days of life, few months of life anda few years of life. these three open-heart surgeries give us an opportunity at thesecond one to deliver these

stem cells into their heartwith the intent of trying to make their heart bigger,better and stronger. roman went through theprocedure three months ago and received the stemcells and since that time, he's done extremely well. what we believe ishappening is these cells are probably stimulatingthe underlying regenerative capacity of the heart. there's 40,000 childrenborn in the united states

with congenital heartdisease and a good percentage of them develop heart failureso this type of therapy may allow us to delay or, ideally, prevent the need for cardiac transplantation. - i hope roman's future has no set-backs, nothing holds him back. - my hope for roman's surgeries is that it'll benefit people in the future. - the reality that we'refacing today in bio-medical

research is funding is being pushed down at the national level soit really creates this valley of death betweeninnovation and applications. - if you look at the majormilestones in medicine, we had antibiotic therapy for the life-threatening infections, then we had the inception of heart surgery using the heart lung machine. then we had transplantationwhere we were able

to come up with medicinesthat minimized rejection. that was probably the lastmajor miracle in medicine. this is the next potentialmiracle in medicine where it has the potentialto impact the largest number of patients in healthcare,in heart failure. so we can make a difference,so we should make a difference. thank you.