Defibrotide Shown to Protect Rabbit Hearts After Coronary Artery Blockage

Berti and colleagues, writing in Haemostasis in 1986, report that defibrotide — a polydeoxyribonucleotide (a chain of DNA building blocks) made from mammalian sources — reduced heart muscle damage in rabbits three days after their coronary arteries were blocked.

The study was conducted in animals, not humans. The researchers describe defibrotide as having blood-clot-dissolving (profibrinolytic) properties and the ability to trigger release of a substance called PGI2, both linked to protective effects against blood clots. In this experiment, animals given defibrotide after coronary occlusion kept more normal beta-adrenoceptor function — receptors that respond to stress hormones and whose activity normally drops during a heart attack. Defibrotide also prevented the sharp decline of an enzyme called creatine phosphokinase in the affected heart tissue, which the authors use as a marker of cell damage from prolonged oxygen deprivation.

The abstract offers hypotheses about how fibrinolytic activity and PGI2 release might combine to produce these effects, but does not establish the mechanism directly. As an animal study of a specific pharmaceutical compound, it cannot show whether similar effects occur in humans, nor does it address skin, wound healing, or topical use.