In early August, a 25-year-old biologist sat down on the set of “Otro día perdido”, Mario Pergolini’s late-night show on Argentina’s El Trece, to talk about placentas, scar tissue and sheep. Within days Pilar Ferrer’s name was all over the Argentine press. With her team at Favaloro University in Buenos Aires, she is developing an injectable gel that could help the heart repair itself after a heart attack.
A scar that does not heal
During a heart attack, a coronary artery becomes blocked and part of the heart muscle, starved of blood, dies. The heart cannot replace those cells. A stiff scar forms in their place, and it no longer contracts. Depending on its size, it can lead to heart failure, serious arrhythmias and sometimes a transplant. According to the World Heart Federation, more than 64 million people worldwide live with heart failure.
“What we are trying to do with these therapies is reduce that damage to prevent heart failure,” Ferrer has said. That is a more modest aim than some of this summer’s headlines, which talked about “curing” the heart. The gel is meant to help the tissue that survived do better than it would on its own.
The placenta, minus its cells
It starts with the amniotic membrane, the thin layer of the placenta that surrounds a baby in the womb. Doctors already use it to treat wounds and burns. The team strips out the cells and keeps only the framework. “This is without stem cells, only the matrix,” Ferrer explained. “A tissue has cells and a support. We use the support.”
Turned into a hydrogel, that support is injected straight into the damaged area, where it works as scaffolding. Healthy cells nearby find what they need to multiply, and new blood vessels can grow. In the scenario the team describes, a surgeon would apply the gel to the scar during coronary bypass surgery, when the heart is already exposed.
Tested in sheep
The gel first passed tests on cell cultures. The team then moved on to sheep, whose cardiovascular system is among the closest to ours. Twenty-eight days after treatment, the researchers saw smaller infarcts, more new blood vessels and more dividing heart cells. “The technology showed significant improvements in heart function in sheep,” Ferrer said.
These results should be taken for what they are: preclinical work in animals. The press coverage gives neither the number of animals treated nor detailed measurements. The gel has never been tested in people and is not used in any hospital. Ferrer says so herself: the animal experiments still need to be validated, and so do tests on human tissue.
A PhD that became a company
Ferrer studied biological sciences at Favaloro University, founded by René Favaloro, the Argentine surgeon who pioneered coronary bypass surgery. She chose the field because she loved understanding how the human body works. As a doctoral fellow she works at the Institute of Translational Medicine, Transplantation and Bioengineering (IMeTTyB), run jointly by the university and CONICET, Argentina’s national research council. She belongs to its Cardiovascular Regenerative Medicine Laboratory, led by Daniela Olea and María del Rosario Bauzá. The project grew out of her thesis. “I started in November 2023,” she told the newspaper La Nación.
In 2024 she decided to turn the work into a company. Amnova Biotech, where she is now chief executive, brings together Olea, a biotechnologist and CONICET researcher; pharmacist Mariano Berra, the chief technology officer; and biochemist Alejandro Berra, who runs Amnios BMA, an amniotic membrane bank licensed by INCUCAI, Argentina’s transplant agency, and by ANMAT, the national health regulator. The start-up is backed by CITES, the venture fund of the Sancor Seguros group, based in Sunchales in Santa Fe province. It was also selected for START, the accelerator programme of the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.
Private money was a necessity as well. Under President Javier Milei, Argentina has cut science budgets, prompting protests from many researchers. The Foncyt research fund was suspended and PICT project grants were scrapped, so the founders turned to private investors.
Still years away
When La Nación reached her in August, she was in São Paulo on project business. Her timetable was cautious. The regulatory process is due to begin next year, and she expects roughly two years before clinical trials start, run in phases. Even if everything goes to plan, no patient will receive this gel for some time.
She is also keen to point out that she did not do this alone. The gel is the work of an interdisciplinary team, and she is the one who ended up in front of the camera. Someone had to explain on television what a placental membrane might do for a damaged heart. At 25, she did it in plain words and without promising miracles.
