Researchers at Columbia Engineering have established a new method to patch a damaged heart using a tissue-engineering platform that enables heart tissue to repair itself. This breakthrough, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/04/19/1104619108.long, is an important step forward in combating cardiovascular disease, one of the most serious health problems of our day. Led by Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, the researchers developed a novel cell therapy to treat myocardial infarction (heart damage that follows a heart attack).
