Kenneth Chien, director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cardiovascular Research Center and a professor in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School, says that the regenerative qualities of stem cells hold great long-term promise in treating heart disease. But the scientific vision of cardiac muscle regeneration has yet to be proven in clinical trials, and a growing body of evidence suggests that any benefits may actually be due to a secondary effect rather than to the regenerated cardiac muscle cells themselves. On page 34, he writes about the lessons learned from these early trials, which he calls a "parable for regenerative medicine."
Gladstone Institutes president Robert Mahley first encountered ApoE in 1972, while studying its role in heart disease and cholesterol metabolism as a researcher at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. By the mid-1980s, he and his colleagues realized that ApoE was playing an important role ...
