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Despite recent advances in the management of patients with heart failure, and because of the scarcity of heart donors, the incidence and prevalence of the disease remains notably high in our countries. Recent epidemiological data have shown an incidence of 225 patients with severe heart failure per million, with a rate of death of 35% per year.1 This has encouraged the development of new methods of biological assistance, also called cardiomyoplasty techniques. The first of these is dynamic cardiomyoplasty, which uses the latissimus dorsi muscle wrapped around a deficient heart which is stimulated, but this procedure produces inconsistent and moderate objective haemodynamic effects. Another technique is molecular cardiomyoplasty, which is based on the transformation of non-myogenic into contractile cells or attempts to induce the cardiomyocytes to re-enter the cellular cycle; for the moment this remains out of reach. A third technique is cellular cardiomyoplasty, which involves myogenic cell grafting within the myocardium to limit any consequences of the loss of contractile function of a damaged left ventricle.2
Somatic cell transplantation
Transplantation of somatic cells to supply the function of a deficient organ has been successfully performed for decades for bone marrow, and more recently, only with inconsistent results, for skeletal muscles (Duchenne dystrophy), liver (as a bridge to transplantation), pancreas (islets of Langerhans) or brain.2 It has been shown that minced fetal brain tissue can be grafted within the brain of Parkinsonian patients, increasing dopamine secretion and decreasing symptoms. Like brain cells, adult ventricular myocytes are terminally differentiated, with no possibility of cell division from neonatal age; thus, following injury (infarction), repair consists of scar formation, …