Researchers at Mt. Sinai made an important finding in the field of stem cell research that can have an impact on how doctors treat heart disease. Health reporter Kafi Drexel filed the following report.

Researchers at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine recently achieved the major accomplishment of reprogramming a skin cell to make it beat as an abnormal heart cell. They did it by starting with skin samples that were converted to stem cells from two patients with cardiomyopathy, a disease that results in the weakening of the heart.

"The remarkable thing is we were able to find out that the heart cells were in fact abnormal in ways that were quite similar to what we would expect, based on the problems that patients had to start with," said Dr. Bruce Gelb of the Mt. Sinai Medical Center.

Researchers say that is a feat that has not been accomplished before, and that the discovery could play a role in helping to treat all forms of heart disease down the road.

"A fundamental problem we’ve had is that we don’t have access to diseased human heart cells in a reliable way. First of all, obviously, people tend to need their hearts," said Gelb. "And number two, even if you somehow get access to them you can't maintain them outside the body for any length of time. You can't maintain them in culture.

"Here we have basically an infinite source of human diseased heart cells and those can be used to test for new treatments," continues Gelb. "So for instance, we know in this case that the cells tend to become diseased in a particular way. They sort of overgrow."

The next step is to start investigating which drugs or chemicals can be turned into drugs that could actually block that process. Once they find the right drug, they will begin preclinical trials, most likely first in animals.