Year 2
Heart failure is a leading cause of mortality and morbidity in California and Western world. Over half of heart failure causes are due to dilated cardiomyopathy, a disorder of progressive ventricular dilatation and decreased contractility. However, the mortality rate for heart failure has been stagnant over the past few years nationally and in California. Hence new knowledge and developments gained from this research can go a long way to ameliorating the burden caused by this disorder. Our goal here is to collect tissues from patients with heart failure so that induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) can be generated to understand their disease mechanism.