When Sara Vasconcelos talks about her work, it sounds as if she’s in the restoration business. But instead of repairing damaged buildings, the researcher at Toronto’s University Health Network wants to fix damaged hearts by using stem cells to rebuild cardiovascular tissue.
While doing so, she also hopes to overcome a barrier that has stood in the path of those who are trying to repair hearts using cardiomyocytes – heart tissue cells that are grown from embryonic stem cells. The problem is that the replacement cells wither away if they are not nourished and kept alive by blood vessels.
With her grant secured, Dr. Vasconcelos said she is assembling the team that will test the method on pig hearts later this year. Ultimately, her goal is to develop the technique into a therapy that can restore cardiac function in human patients following a heart attack, she said. In the future, he added, the study could open the door to teaching the body to continually produce and replenish its own cancer-killing immune cells rather than having those cellsAs part of another of the funded projects, David Thompson at the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute will conduct clinical trials for one of the world’s first genetically engineered cell replacement therapies for type 1 diabetes.