The project, led by Tamer M.A. Mohamed, assistant professor of medicine in the UofL Division of Cardiovascular Medicine and the UofL Institute of Molecular Cardiology, has received a five-year, $3.8 million grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

“After a patient suffers a heart attack, the heart loses muscle cells, reducing the heart’s ability to pump blood to the rest of the body. Muscle cells in the heart do not regenerate on their own, leaving the heart permanently impaired,” Mohamed said. “We are developing a transient gene therapy approach to regenerate these muscle cells to heal the heart.”

The therapy involves transient overexpression of a combination of four cell-cycle regulating proteins to induce cell division in the heart muscle. The four cell-cycle regulators, cyclin-dependent kinase 1 (CDK1), CDK4, cyclin B1, and cyclin D1, are known collectively as 4F, or four factors. In , the process stimulated cell division in cardiomyocytes, or heart cells, leading to improved heart function.

The new study will determine further the effectiveness and safety of the therapy in animal models as well as in human heart segments using of a developed at UofL by Mohamed that keeps slices of human hearts alive for a longer period of time. The system mimics the environment of a living organ through continuous electrical stimulation and oxygenation, maintaining viability and functionality of the heart segments for six days, allowing more extensive testing. The for use by researchers outside UofL.

In addition to further testing the therapy’s effectiveness, Mohamed and other investigators will focus on approaches for the process that do not lead to tumor development in other cells.

“The challenge comes in avoiding development of cancer in other areas of the body, which appears to be a side effect of the process as seen in mice,” Mohamed said.

If it is successful, the work will lead to the start of in-human clinical trials.

Gary H. Gibbons, MD, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health, will discuss that institute’s strategic vision in the 24^th Leonard Leight Lecture at the University of Louisville on Friday, Nov. 4, at noon in the HSC Auditorium in Kornhauser Library.

The NHLBI recently announced a strategic vision of eight objectives that provide the framework for the institute’s research priorities for the coming decade. In his talk, “Charting our future together: Setting an agenda for the NHLBI,” Gibbons will outline the priorities set out in the vision, which support the NHLBI’s goals to understand and promote health, stimulate discoveries in the causes of disease, enable the translation of those discoveries into clinical practice and foster the next generation of scientists and physicians.

“The convergence of innovations in areas such as computational biology, data science, bioengineering and high-throughput ‘omics’ technologies is paving the way for a new appreciation of human health and disease,” Gibbons said as the institute published the in August. “We now have unprecedented opportunities to better understand the complex interplay of environmental, behavioral and molecular factors that promote health; a clearer picture of the earliest point of disease development; and the ability to repair damaged tissues with stem cell and tissue engineering techniques.”

The NHLBI provides global leadership for research, training and education programs to promote the prevention and treatment of heart, lung and blood diseases and enhance the health of all individuals so that they can live longer and more fulfilling lives.

Gibbons’s talk is scheduled for Friday, Nov. 4, 2016, noon to 1 p.m. in the HSC Auditorium in Kornhauser Library on the UofL Health Sciences Center Campus.

On Oct. 14, Linda S. Birnbaum, PhD, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program, discussed environmental research and the role of the NIEHS in human health at UofL as the keynote speaker of Research!Louisville.

The Leonard Leight Lecture is presented by the in the at the UofL School of Medicine. For 30 years until 1996, Leight was a practicing cardiologist in Louisville and played a major role in developing cardiology services and bringing innovative treatment modalities in heart disease to Louisville. The Leonard Leight Lecture series was established in 1994 and is made possible by gifts from Dr. and Mrs. Kurt Ackermann and Medical Center Cardiologists to the Jewish Hospital & St. Mary’s Foundation.