How do you move from elegantly constructed mouse knockouts like the ones presented at the linkurl:Keystone Symposium on Molecular Mechanisms of Cardiac Disease and Regeneration;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/23130/ here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to pesky wild-type humans who often seem to court heart attacks? If you?re linkurl:Elizabeth Nabel,;http://www.genome.gov/17015041 director of the linkurl:National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute,;http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/new/press/05-01-26.htm the path is fairly direct. When she?s not figuring out how to keep most of the participants of this meeting in grants, Nabel still runs a lab. Her talk tonight started with a reminder that in the adult vasculature, there?s a close relationship between angiogenesis, proliferation of the smooth muscle that makes up the heart, and inflammation. Her lab?s search for molecular and cellular mechanisms that regulate the proliferative response led them to p27, a cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor. p27-null mice display abnormal but generally benign hyperplasia of many organs. Following a wire injury to the...
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