Transatlantic study to help damaged hearts repair themselves

A $6 million, five-year grant from the Parisian Fondation Leduq has set up a transatlantic effort to study ways to help damaged hearts repair themselves, using stem cells from bone marrow, bloodstream, and adult heart tissue.

Dr. Michael Schneider, professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, is the U.S. coordinator of the program, which will involve European and American scientists and physicians in Frankfurt, Rome, and Houston. Schneider and Dr. Robert Schwartz, co-directors of BCM's Center for Cardiovascular Development, both are members of the research effort, dubbed the “Transatlantic Network of Excellence for Cardiac Regeneration.” The research will start with determining the source of these stem cells for the heart early in life. It will progress to engineering the cells to enhance their ability to repair damaged heart muscle, and then to study the effects of such optimized cells in patients with heart disease.

“This is a bench to bedside effort that demonstrates translational medical research at its best,” said Schneider. “The opportunity to work closely with European colleagues in the field, including those most expert anywhere in human trials of stem cells for the heart, will help us solve this challenging problem faster.”

Schneider and Schwartz have long been interested in applying knowledge of how the heart is normally made to generating new heart muscle cells for diseased or damaged hearts. Schneider discovered a rare and unexpected population of adult heart-forming cells, and Schwartz studies the way in which genes that create the heart are first turned on and function. They are founders of Kardia Therapeutics, a Houston start-up company for novel treatments of heart failure created through BCM Technologies, the incubator for commercialization of discoveries by Baylor College of Medicine faculty.

Coordinating the European efforts will be Dr. Stefanie Dimmeler, director of molecular cardiology at the J. W. Goethe-University in Frankfurt, Germany. Other members of the network are her collaborator Dr. Andreas Zeiher at the same institution, stem cell biologist Dr. Giulio Cossu of the Stem Cell Research Institute San Raffaele in Milan, Italy and mouse geneticist Nadia Rosenthal, head of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory at Monterotondo (near Rome, Italy).