Disease Focus: Heart Disease
Optimization in the Identification, Selection and Induction of Maturation of Subtypes of Cardiomyocytes derived from Human Embryonic Stem Cells
Cardiovascular diseases remain the major cause of death in the western world. Stem and progenitor cell-derived cardiomyocytes (SPC-CMs) hold great promise for the myocardial repair. However, most of SPC-CMs displayed heterogeneous and immature electrophysiological phenotypes with substantial automaticity. Implanting these electrically immature and inhomogeneous CMs to the hearts would be arrhythmogenic and deleterious. Further optimization […]
Building Cardiac Tissue from Stem Cells and Natural Matrices
Congestive heart failure afflicts 4.8 million people, with 400,000 new cases each year. Myocardial infarction (MI), also known as a “heart attack”, leads to a loss of cardiac tissue and impairment of left ventricular function. Because the heart does not contain a significant number of multiplying stem, precursor, or reserve cells, it is unable to […]
Induction of cardiogenesis in pluripotent cells via chromatin remodeling factors
Heart disease is one of the biggest killers in the civilized world, and as populations age, this trend will increase dramatically. Currently the only way to treat failing hearts is with expensive and relatively ineffective drugs, or by heart transplantation. Ideally, we would like to be able to regenerate sick or dead heart tissue. The […]
Derivation and analysis of pluripotent stem cell lines with inherited TGF-b mediated disorders from donated IVF embryos and reprogrammed adult skin fibroblasts
The field of regenerative medicine revolves around the capacity of a subset of cells, called stem cells, to become the mature tissues of the adult human body. By studying stem cells, we hope to develop methods and reagents for treating disease. For instance, we hope to develop methods for making stem cells become cardiovascular cells […]
Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells for Cardiovascular Diagnostics
Our objective is to use induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell technology to produce a cell-based test for long QT syndrome (LQTS), a major form of sudden cardiac death. Nearly 500,000 people in the US die of sudden cardiac death each year. LQTS can be triggered by drug exposure or stresses. Drug-induced LQTS is the single […]
Prospective isolation of hESC-derived hematopoietic and cardiomyocyte stem cells
The capacity of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) to perpetuate themselves indefinitely in culture and to differentiate to all cell types of the body has lead to numerous studies that aim to isolate therapeutically relevant cells for the benefit of patients, and also to study how genetic diseases develop. However, hESCs can cause tumors called […]
Modeling Myocardial Therapy with Human Embryonic Stem Cells
Five million people in the U.S. suffer with heart failure, at a cost of $30 billion/year. Heart failure occurs when the heart is damaged and becomes unable to meet the demands placed on it. Unlike some tissues, heart muscle does not regenerate. Human embryonic stem cells grow and divide indefinitely while maintaining the potential to […]
microRNA Regulation of Cardiomyocyte Differentiation from Human Embryonic Stem Cells
Regenerative therapies could be particularly beneficial for heart disease, which is the leading killer of adults in the U.S, and is responsible for the 5 million Americans with insufficient cardiac function. At the other end of the age spectrum, malformations of the heart involving abnormal cell lineage or morphogenetic decisions are the leading noninfectious cause […]
Engineering a Cardiovascular Tissue Graft from Human Embryonic Stem Cells
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) affects more than 71 million Americans and 1.7 million Californians. Recently, engineered cardiovascular tissue grafts, or “patches”, including one made from mouse embryonic stem cells (ESC), have shown promising results as a future therapy for CVD. Our overall goal is to extend these recent results to human ESC as follows. Aim 1: […]
Chemical Genetic Approach to Production of hESC-derived Cardiomyocytes
Adult heart muscle cells retain negligible proliferative capacity and this underlies the inability of the heart to replace muscle cells that are lost to injury, such as infarct, and underlies progression to heart failure. To date, no stem cell therapiy has produced significant cardiomyocyte replacement. Instead, transplanted cells, if they persist at all, produce endothelial […]