A scientific collaborative established to fulfill the promise of stem cell biology.
Kenneth R. Chien, MD, PhD
Affiliation: Massachusetts General Hospital
Email:
kchien@partners.org
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of mortality in the U.S., and is a growing global health problem in developing nations. In the U.S. alone, approximately 71 million people are affected by coronary heart disease, which costs society $403.1 billion in 2003. At the same time, heart failure is the leading cause for hospitalization, and the demand for heart transplantation continues to vastly exceed the availability of donor hearts. While there is an array of medications and other treatments for heart disease, none of them are cures, and the course of the disease is relentlessly progressive. In this regard, a number of clinical trials have attempted to regenerate heart muscle after a heart attack through the use of bone marrow stem cells, but recently it is becoming clear that there is little or no evidence of muscle regeneration and the clinical results have been largely disappointing. There is now an urgent need to identify the most promising cardiovascular stem cells for achieving true muscle regeneration. At the same time, the technology of human ES cells is moving as such a rapid pace that we are in a position to develop patient specific master cardiovascular stem cells that have genetic mutations that lead to important forms of heart disease. By utilizing these stem cells as model systems, it should be possible to identify the molecular pathways that drive heart disease, and to develop specific, targeted therapy for rare and common forms of heart disease, by directly screening for both genes and drugs that can block the onset of the disease at a cellular level. At the same time, we plan to rigorously study the potential of master cardiovascular stem cells for regeneration of heart muscle and other important heart tissues, including the formation of coronary arterial blood vessels.
Moretti A, Caron L, Nakano A, Lam JT, Bernshausen A, Chen Y, Qyang Y, Bu L, Sasaki M, Martin-Puig S, Sun Y, Evans SM, Laugwitz KL, Chien KR. Multipotent Embryonic Isl1(+) Progenitor Cells Lead to Cardiac, Smooth Muscle, and Endothelial Cell Diversification. Cell. 2006 Nov 20.
Laugwitz KL, Moretti A, Lam J, Gruber P, Chen Y, Woodard S, Lin LZ, Cai CL, Lu MM, Reth M, Platoshyn O, Yuan JX, Evans S, Chien KR. Postnatal isl1+ cardioblasts enter fully differentiated cardiomyocyte lineages. Nature. 2005 Feb 10;433(7026):647-53.
Bio-Sketch
Dr. Kenneth Chien is an internationally recognized biologist specializing in cardiovascular science, as well as a pioneer in developing new therapeutic strategies to prevent the onset and progression of heart failure. Since July 2005, Ken has returned to Boston as Scientific Director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. He is a member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, where he leads the university-wide Cardiovascular Stem Cell Biology Program. Upon his return to the Harvard community, he was awarded the distinction of the first endowed chair of the Charles Addison & Elizabeth Ann Sanders Professor of Medicine. Prior to his MGH/HMS appointments, Ken directed the Institute for Molecular Medicine at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). He is a professor emeritus at UCSD, and continues his appointment as an adjunct professor of The Salk Institute.
A graduate of Harvard University, Dr. Chien went on to earn his MD and PhD from Temple University in Pennsylvania. After completing his internship, residency, and cardiology fellowship training at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, he joined the faculty of the UCSD Departments of Medicine and Cardiology and the Center for Molecular Genetics. Subsequently, Dr. Chien became the Director of the UCSD Institute of Molecular Medicine and directed the joint UCSD-Salk Institute National Institutes of Health Molecular Medicine Training Program. Given his longstanding interest in training physician-scientists, he has served as an advisor/panel member of several private biomedical foundations, including the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. He also has served as a senior consultant and board member to several biotechnology and large pharmas over the past decade, fostering collaborative ties between academia and the private sector. His most recent accomplishments include the establishment of a new Institute of Molecular Medicine at Peking University, currently the premier site for cardiovascular science and medicine in China. He has received several awards for his work, including the Pasarow Foundation Award and the Walter B. Cannon Award of the American Physiological Society.
