'These are [the] first-in-human studies to take regeneration into the clinic,' says Andrew Baker, a gene-therapy researcher at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who is unaffiliated with the efforts. 'It's a very exciting time.' But the excitement is tempered with caution. The mammalian heart is bad at repairing itself and 'is notoriously unwieldy when it comes to efforts to try to get it to regenerate', says Sean Wu, a cardiologist at Stanford University in California. Some scientists are unconvinced that the data underpinning the existing clinical trial show true regeneration in the form of cell division. And efforts to regenerate the heart are still haunted by a controversy that led to the retraction of at least a dozen papers and the closure of a high-profile laboratory. Developing a gene therapy in this field will be difficult, says Antonio Abbate, a cardiologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. But 'we have to do research because, eventually, we'll get it...
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