Hiberna licensed technology developed by CU-Boulder Professor Leslie Leinwand based on the natural ability of pythons to increase their heart size by up to 60 percent and speed their metabolism by 40-fold after feeding episodes. Leinwand said the ability of pythons and other constricting snakes to enlarge and then decrease their heart muscle mass in just days may help researchers target new drugs for treating cardiac growth in response to disease, which causes human heart muscle to thicken and decreases the size of heart chambers and heart function. Increases in cardiac size are clinically important because heart enlargement in humans resulting from exercise is beneficial, but heart enlargement from high blood pressure is unhealthy, said Leinwand, who studies genetic heart defects. Understanding which genes are involved in regulating the python’s rapid heart muscle changes may have implications for treating cardiac hypertrophy, or thickening of the heart muscle, she said. Leinwand has studied hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, or HCM, a genetic disease marked by a thickening of heart muscle related to a weakness in individual muscle fibers that causes them to work harder to pump blood and consequently enlarge. read more
[Tags]heart, muscle, leinwand, pythons, cardiac, hiberna, weight loss news[/Tags]
