$8 million NIH grant for heart cell development and study (USA)

The Medical College of Wisconsin has been awarded a five-year, $8 million, multi-investigator Program Project Grant (PPG) from the National Institutes of Health to understand how human pluripotent stem cells, defined as cells which if left to their own designs can develop into any of the more than 200 cell types in the human body, can be channeled to exclusively become heart muscle cells. "To date no one has been able to replace damaged heart tissue. If we can use pluripotent cells to produce cardiac myocytes, which constitute the contractile tissue of the human heart, in laboratory dishes, we could potentially transplant them into diseased hearts to compensate for the loss of muscle tissue," says John Lough, Ph.D., head of the investigative team and professor of cell biology, neurobiology and anatomy - EurekAlert