The mission of the Council on Basic Cardiovascular Sciences is to improve understanding of mechanisms of basic cardiovascular regulation to support the development of new therapies and insights into clinical cardiovascular disease. Special emphasis is placed on integrating molecular/cellular and physiological approaches to address problems relating to functional genomics, cell signaling, myocardial biology, circulatory physiology, pathophysiology and peripheral vascular disease. The council plays a major role in linking basic science to clinical science and is concerned with advancing and applying knowledge derived from basic science to the patient.
Annually AHA asks all of its Councils and science groups what in their estimation have been the most important advances in their respective fields within the past year. We have pulled out of all of those suggestions the ones that came from or are relevant to our community. Several studies this year brought the future of medicine closer to the present with new insight into emerging technologies. These studies evaluate the role of stem cells in cardiac repair and their ability to differentiate into cardiac myocytes and the ability of the heart to replace and regenerate myocytes on its own. The findings from stem cell therapy have been shown to improve quality of life and survival in patients with chronic heart failure and support the development of future cell-based therapeutics.
 Mark Sussman, PhD, FAHA, is the Chair of the BCVS Council. He is the Distinguished Professor of Biology at the SDSU Heart Institute, San Diego State University in the Department of Biology. |  Walter Koch, PhD, FAHA, is the Vice Chair of the BCVS Council. He is the W.W. Smith Professor of Cardiology at the Center for Translational Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University. |
Major BCVS Scientific Advances for 2011
| 1 | Evidence for human lung stem cells. This study supports that human lungs contain identifiable stem cells, which have been shown to participate in tissue homeostasis and regeneration as well as possibly promoting tissue restoration in patients with lung disease. Kajstura J, Rota M, Hall SR, Hosoda T et al. N Engl J Med. 2011 May 12;364(19):1795-806. Abstract |
| 2 | Intramyocardial stem cell injection in patients with ischemic cardiomyopathy: functional recovery and reverse remodeling. Transcatheter, intramyocardial injections of autologous bone marrow progenitor cells were shown to improve regional contractility of a chronic myocardial scar. These changes can predict subsequent reverse remodeling. Williams AR, Trachtenberg B, Velazquez DL, McNiece I et al. Circ Res. 2011 Apr 1;108(7):792-6. Epub 2011 Mar 17. Abstract |
| 3 | Novel MicroRNA Prosurvival Cocktail for Improving Engraftment and Function of Cardiac Progenitor Cell Transplantation. |
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