Heart Failure Fact Sheet

CIRM funds extensive research in heart disease, including heart failure. Some research is basic in nature, investigating heart function and development, while other projects are moving stem cell-based therapies to the clinic.

If you want to learn more about CIRM funding decisions or make a comment directly to our board, join us at a public meeting. You can find agendas for upcoming public meetings on our meetings page.

Learn more about stem cell research:
Stem Cell Basics Primer | Stem Cell Videos | What We Fund

Find clinical trials:
CIRM does not track stem cell clinical trials. If you or a family member is interested in participating in a clinical trial, please see the national trial database to find a trial near you: clinicaltrials.gov

Stem cell research for heart failure

Heart disease strikes in many forms, but collectively it causes one third of all deaths in the U.S. Many forms of heart disease have a common result—cardiomyopathy. While this is commonly called congestive heart failure (CHF), it is really just the heart becoming less efficient due to any number of causes, but the most common is loss of functioning heart muscle due to the damage caused by a heart attack. An estimated 4.8 million Americans have CHF, with 400,000 new cases diagnosed each year. Half die within five years.

Numerous clinical trials are underway testing a type of stem cell found in borne marrow, called mesenchymal stem cells or MSCs, to see if they are effective in treating the form of CHF that follows a heart attack. While those trials have shown some small improvements in patients the researchers have not found that the MSCs are creating replacement heart muscle. They think the improvements may be due to the MSCs creating new blood vessels that then help make the existing heart muscle healthier, or in other ways strengthening the existing tissue.

California’s stem cell agency has numerous awards looking into heart disease (the full list is below). Most of these involve looking for ways to create stem cells that can replace the damaged heart muscle, restoring the heart’s ability to efficiently pump blood around the body. Some researchers are looking to go beyond transplanting cells into the heart and are instead exploring the use of tissue engineering technologies, such as building artificial scaffolds in the lab and loading them with stem cells that, when placed in the heart, may stimulate the recovery of the muscle.

Other CIRM-funded researchers are working in the laboratory, looking at stem cells from heart disease patients to better understand the disease and even using those models to discover and test new drugs to see if they are effective in treating heart disease. Other researchers are trying to make a type of specialized heart cell called a pacemaker cell, which helps keep a proper rhythm to the heart’s beat.

We also fund projects that are trying to take promising therapies out of the laboratory and closer to being tested in people. These Disease Team Awards encourage the creation of teams that have both the scientific knowledge and business skills needed to produce therapies that can get approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be tested in people. In some cases, these awards also fund the early phase clinical trials to show that they are safe to use and, in some cases, show some signs of being effective.

Disease Team Awards

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center

This team developed a way to isolate some heart-specific stem cells that are found in adult heart muscle. They use clumps of cells called Cardiospheres to reduce scarring caused by heart attacks. Initially they used cells obtained from the patient’s own heart but they later developed methods to obtain the cells they need from donor organs, which allows the procedure to become an off-the-shelf-therapy, meaning it can be available when and where the patient needs it rather than having to create it new each time. The company, working with the Cedars-Sinai team, received FDA approval to begin a clinical trial in June 2012.

Read about the team's progress

Stanford School of Medicine

This team plans to turn embryonic stem cells into what are called cardiomyocites, the kind of cells that can become heart muscle. They plan to develop methods for producing sufficient quantities for clinical therapy and to do all the laboratory work and preliminary testing needed to gain FDA approval of a clinical trial by the close of the grant. They are proposing to carry out a trial with patients who have disease that is so advanced that they are on a waiting list for heart transplants.

Read about the team's progress

Bruce Conklin of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease
talks about using stem cells to screen drugs for heart side effects

CIRM Grants Targeting Heart Disease

Researcher name	Institution	Grant Title	Funding
Eduardo Marbán	Cedars-Sinai Medical Center	Autologous cardiac-derived cells for advanced ischemic cardiomyopathy	$5,560,232
Rachel Smith	Capricor, Inc	Allogeneic Cardiac-Derived Stem Cells for Patients Following a Myocardial Infarction	$19,782,136
Joseph Wu	Stanford University	Human Embryonic Stem Cell-Derived Cardiomyocytes for Patients with End Stage Heart Failure	$19,999,899
Sheng Ding	The J. David Gladstone Institutes	A new paradigm of lineage-specific reprogramming	$1,708,560
Eduardo Marbán	Cedars-Sinai Medical Center	Mechanism of heart regeneration by cardiosphere-derived cells	$1,367,604
Huei-sheng Chen	Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute	Studying Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Dysplasia with patient-specific iPS cells	$1,582,606
Ching-Pin Chang	Stanford University	VEGF signaling in adventitial stem cells in vascular physiology and disease	$3,330,931
Kara McCloskey	University of California, Merced	Building Cardiac Tissue from Stem Cells and Natural Matrices	$1,706,255
Phillip Yang	Stanford University	In Vivo Molecular Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Human Embryonic Stem Cells in Murine Model of Myocardial Infarction	$658,125
Randall Lee	University of California, San Francisco	Embryonic Stem Cell-Derived Therapies Targeting Cardiac Ischemic Disease	$2,524,617
Harold Bernstein	University of California, San Francisco	Modeling Myocardial Therapy with Human Embryonic Stem Cells	$2,229,140
Christopher Zarins	Stanford University	Engineering a Cardiovascular Tissue Graft from Human Embryonic Stem Cells	$2,618,704
Mark Mercola	Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute	Chemical Genetic Approach to Production of hESC-derived Cardiomyocytes	$3,036,002
Bruce Conklin	The J. David Gladstone Institutes	Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells for Cardiovascular Diagnostics	$1,708,560
Michael Longaker	Stanford University	Derivation and analysis of pluripotent stem cell lines with inherited TGF-b mediated disorders from donated IVF embryos and reprogrammed adult skin fibroblasts	$1,424,412
Sylvia Evans	University of California, San Diego	Specification of Ventricular Myocyte and Pacemaker Lineages Utilizing Human Embryonic Stem Cells	$609,999
Krishna Shenoy	Stanford University	Technology for hESC-Derived Cardiomyocyte Differentiation and Optimization of Graft-Host Integration in Adult Myocardium	$634,287
Michelle Khine	University of California, Irvine	Micro Platform for Controlled Cardiac Myocyte Differentiation	$363,707
John Cashman	Human BioMolecular Research Institute	Discovering Potent Molecules with Human ESCs to Treat Heart Disease	$714,654
Huei-sheng Chen	Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute	Development of Neuro-Coupled Human Embryonic Stem Cell-Derived Cardiac Pacemaker Cells.	$744,639
Robb Maclellan	University of California, Los Angeles	Human Cardiovascular Progenitors, their Niches and Control of Self-renewal and Cell Fate	$1,378,076
Reza Ardehali	University of California, Los Angeles	Preclinical evaluation of human embryonic stem cell-derived cardiovascular progenitors	$2,930,388
Ali Nsair	University of California, Los Angeles	Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell-Derived Cardiovascular Progenitor Cells for Cardiac Cell Therapy.	$3,004,315
Eric Adler	University of California, San Diego	Identification of Novel Therapeutics for Danon Disease Using an iPS Model of the Disease	$1,701,575
Farah Sheikh	University of California, San Diego	Molecular Mechanisms Underlying Human Cardiac Cell Junction Maturation and Disease Using Human iPSC	$1,341,955
Deepak Srivastava	The J. David Gladstone Institutes	Direct Cardiac Reprogramming for Heart Regeneration	$6,319,110
Deepak Srivastava	The J. David Gladstone Institutes	Mechanisms of Direct Cardiac Reprogramming	$1,708,560
Yang Xu	University of California, San Diego	Human ES cell based therapy of heart failure without allogenic immune rejection	$1,857,600
Sean Wu	Stanford University	Elucidating Molecular Basis of Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy with Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells	$1,425,600
John Laird	University of California, Davis	Phase I study of IM Injection of VEGF Producing MSC for the Treatment of Critical Limb Ischemia	$76,861
Jane Lebkowski	Geron Corporation	Preclinical Development and First-In-Human Testing of [REDACTED] in Advanced Heart Failure	$106,239
Robert Robbins	Stanford University	Human Embryonic Stem Cell-Derived Cardiomyocytes for Patients with End Stage Heart Failure	$108,895
Joseph Wu	Stanford University	Heart Repair with Human Tissue Engineered Myocardium	$4,766,231
Walter Boyd	University of California, Davis	Extracellular Matrix Bioscaffold Augmented with Human Stem Cells for Cardiovascular Repair	$4,939,140
Mohammad Pashmforoush	University of Southern California	Transcriptional Regulation of Cardiac Pacemaker Cell Progenitors	$3,149,806
Andrew Putnam	University of California, Irvine	A Novel Engineered Niche to Explore the Vasculogenic Potential of Embryonic Stem Cells	$2,108,683
Patrick McDonough	Vala Sciences, Inc.	Optimization in the Identification, Selection and Induction of Maturation of Subtypes of Cardiomyocytes derived from Human Embryonic Stem Cells	$906,629
			Total: $110,134,732.00