Newswise — Popular wisdom says you can't mend a broken heart " but Dr. Kishore Pasumarthi of Dalhousie Medical School is determined to try.
Cell division in the heart stops in early infancy, which is why heart muscle cells that die in heart attacks are replaced by scar tissue instead of new cells. This permanent damage can lead to heart failure and/or life-threatening arrhythmias.
Pasumarthi is the first person in the world to find a way to prompt heart muscle cells to divide in adult heart muscle tissue. "We are working with cell-cycle proteins " the ones that control cell division," Pasumarthi says. "By putting these proteins into damaged heart tissues, we are finding we can repair the infarct damage." Pasumarthi believes his approach could heal heart attack damage, preventing heart failure and potentially deadly arrhythmias.
Originally trained in veterinary medicine and biotechnology in India, Pasumarthi made the transition to biomedical research during his PhD training at the University of Manitoba. Post-doctoral studies at the Krannert Institute of Cardiology firmly established his interest in repairing the heart-muscle damage caused by heart attacks.
Now, with help from a Dalhousie Medical Research Foundation 'New Investigator Award' and substantial funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Heart and Stroke Foundation of Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation and the Canada Foundation for Innovation, he has established his own myocardial regeneration research program at Dalhousie Medical School.
He's working with stem cells as well as cell-cycle proteins. "I'm going a step beyond stem cell transplants," says Pasumarthi. "As the stem cells start to differentiate into various cell types, I'm identifying and isolating the cardiac progenitor cells into a pure culture." He will then transplant the cardiac progenitor cells into damaged hearts to see if they develop into functional heart muscle cells. Another project aims to prevent heart attack damage by blocking cell-death pathways in the heart.
Pasumarthi has published his groundbreaking discoveries in Nature, The Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Circulation Research, Cardiovascular Research and Tissue Engineering. In December 2007, he published his findings that overexpression of the cell-cyle protein cyclin D2 sustains cardiac function six months after a heart attack in Cardiovascular Research. Many more publications from this dynamic young researcher are pending.
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