New drug could help patients after heart transplants

In a potential breakthrough for heart transplant patients, an experimental drug appears to prevent or reduce a common, deadly side effect: the overgrowth of cells in the blood vessel walls of the new heart.

The condition is called chronic rejection syndrome, also known as "transplant disease." In at least half of all transplanted hearts, muscle cells in the blood vessel walls proliferate, narrowing the vessels and squeezing the supply of blood to the new heart. Death or rejection of the new organ often results.

The new drug, called everolimus, was created to tamp down the immune system so the body does not reject a new organ. Because it was also known to slow cell growth, it was tested against a standard immune-system-suppressing drug in preventing transplant disease.

If the long-term results are as good as the early ones described in the New England Journal of Medicine, it could be a discovery as big as that of the first anti-rejection drug, cyclosporine, said Dr. Clyde W. Yancy, a spokesman for the American Heart Association.

Cyclosporine took organ transplant from experiments to standard operations.