Mending Broken Hearts:

Dr. Kishore Pasumarthi Explores New Territory in Cardiac Regeneration

Popular wisdom says you can’t mend a broken heart – but Dr. Kishore Pasumarthi is determined to try. Originally trained in veterinary medicine and biotechnology in India, Dr. Pasumarthi made the transition to biomedical research during his PhD training. Post-doctoral studies at the Krannert Institute of Cardiology firmly established his interest in repairing heart muscle damage caused by heart attacks. With help from a Dalhousie Medical Research Foundation ‘New Investigator Award,’ he has set up his own cardiac regeneration research program as assistant professor in Dalhousie Medical School’s Department of Pharmacology. 

Dr. Pasumarthi has received substantial funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Heart and Stroke Foundation of Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation and the Canada Foundation for Innovation to explore innovative strategies for post-heart attack myocardial repair.

“I’m going a step beyond stem cell transplants,” says Dr. Pasumarthi, who recently co-authored a paper in the prestigious journal Nature about the inadequacy of adult stem cells in myocardial regeneration. “As the stem cells start to differentiate into various cell types, I’m identifying and isolating the cardiac progenitor cells into a pure culture.” He will then transplant the cardiac progenitor cells into damaged hearts to see if they develop into functional heart muscle cells.

In another project, Dr. Pasumarthi is using gene therapy to reactivate cell division in adult heart muscle tissue. Cell division in the heart stops in early childhood, which is why heart muscle cells that die in heart attacks are replaced by scar tissue instead of new cells. Dr. Pasumarthi believes his approach could heal heart attack damage with minimal scarring – thus preventing heart failure and potentially deadly arrhythmias. A third project aims to prevent heart attack damage by blocking cell-death pathways in the heart. He is a member of the Cardiovascular Research Group.