Year 2
Cardiovascular disease remains to be a major cause of morbidity and mortality in California and the United States. Despite the best medical therapies, none address the issue of irreversible myocardial tissue loss after a heart attack and thus there has been a great interest to develop approaches to induce regeneration. Our lab has focused on harvesting the full potential of patient specific induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to use to attempt to regenerate the damaged tissue. We believe that these iPSCs can be potentially used in the future to generate sufficient number of cells to be implanted in the damaged heart to regenerate the lost tissue post heart attack. Our lab has studied how these cardiac progenitors evolve in the developing heart and applied our finding to iPSCs to recapitulate the cardiac progenitors to ultimately use in clinical therapies. We have successfully derived these cardiac progenitors from patient derived iPSCs in a clinical grade fashion to ensure that we can apply same protocols in the future to clinical use if we are successful in demonstrating the efficacy of this therapy in our translational large animal studies that we will be conducting. We currently are testing their in vivo regeneration potential in small animal studies to assess their safety and efficacy in regenerating the damaged heart.