A BREAKTHROUGH in the treatment of heart patients which could one day replace bypass surgery has been welcomed in the region.

Heart specialists in America say they have found a way of reviving "dead" heart tissue by injecting seriously ill cardiac patients with a growth-promoting gene.

If the small trial can be successfully repeated, it may provide doctors with an effective alternative to major surgery.

Researchers at Tufts University in Boston reported that nine seriously ill heart patients made remarkable recoveries after treatment.

After making a small incision in the patients' chests, surgeons injected doses of a gene which is believed to be important in the growth of new blood vessels directly into the heart.

Professor Jeffrey Isner, spokesman for the Boston team, said the therapy seemed to bring dormant heart tissue back to life. "This is a potentially important finding that was quite unexpected," he said.

Scans showed that blood supplies were fully restored to dormant heart tissue in five out of the nine patients. In the other four the restoration of blood flow was partial.

Six months after the treatment the patients saw a dramatic reduction in the number of angina attacks and a big fall in medication.

Dr Rod Bexton, consultant cardiologist at The Freeman Hospital in Newcastle, said the research sounded very promising but doubted whether it could ever entirely replace bypass surgery.

"Bypasses are so successful in relieving symptoms that I can't see something like this replacing surgery in the forseeable future, but you could see it having a major role with patients who we would consider inoperable," he said.

Even if it gets the go-ahead, Dr Bexton warned that it could be "many years" before the gene therapy treatment arrived in the UK