How St. Boniface Hospital researchers made an important medical breakthrough for heart disease

Researchers at St. Boniface Hospital are celebrating an important discovery that will help cardiac patients live longer.

The Winnipeg-based Czubryt cardiac lab is the first to discover how a specific pro-fibrotic protein affects cardiac fibrosis, a currently untreatable stiffening of the heart muscle.

"If you have fibrosis, it'll progress over time, it'll cause heart failure, eventually it will cause death," said Mike Czubryt, Executive Director of Research at St. Boniface Hospital.

He says cardiac fibrosis happens when any damage is caused to the heart, and scar tissue builds up.

"We know that fibrosis happens as a result of high blood pressure, diabetes, heart attack, anything that damages the heart has a pretty good chance of causing fibrosis," said Czubryt.

The study was published Friday in the European Heart Journal. A total of 17 authors contributed to the research and resulting paper.

Czubryt says his team discovered that removing the protein scleraxis affected the development of fibrosis, "Our experiment was pretty straightforward," he said, "We wanted to delete the gene that encodes scleraxis and then see - in a stressed heart – does that have any effect on the amount of fibrosis we see as a result.

The team experimented on mouse hearts with fibrosis, which is very comparable to the condition in human hearts. Czubryt was surprised at the results.

"It went away," he said. "The function either stopped getting worse or possibly even got a little bit better. And that’s important because when patients come to the hospital, they're already going to have existing fibrosis."

Now the work begins on developing a pharmaceutical treatment for cardiac fibrosis. "We're trying a couple of different approaches to see if we can drug scleraxis in some way," said Czubryt. "We're looking to see if existing drugs might be beneficial, we're looking to see if we can design our own custom drugs."

But he says this discovery means that people suffering from cardiac fibrosis may have a treatment soon.

"Now that we have the evidence that scleraxis is a critical player, by stopping it we improve the situation."