Remembering a heart research pioneer:

Dr. Magda Horackova leaves a lasting legacy 

Dr. Magda Horackova will continue to be an inspiration to a new generation of heart researchers. While her death in late August, 2008, was a terrible loss to her family and friends, Dalhousie Medical School and the world scientific community, her legacy will continue to offer hope for people whose hearts have been damaged by heart attacks.

While working as a professor and research scientist at Dalhousie, Dr. Horackova developed an innovative procedure that uses transplanted skeletal muscle cells to repair heart attack damage and prevent heart failure. Even after retiring from her full-time academic post, she continued working with cardiologist Dr. Robert Chen at the IWK Health Sciences Centre, and cardiac surgeon Dr. Stacy O’Blenes at the QEII Health Sciences Centre, to fine tune the transplant techniques. The researchers’ experiments showed that transplanting muscle cells called myoblasts into heart attack-damaged hearts repairs the injury within three weeks. This groundbreaking work will continue, under the leadership of Dr. O’Blenes.

Dr. Horackova was a member of Dalhousie Medical School for nearly 40 years. Originally from Czechoslovakia, she fled her homeland following the Soviet invasion in 1968. A PhD graduate of the Academy of Sciences in Prague, she worked as a researcher in Germany for two years before joining her husband, Dr. Milan Horacek, at Dalhousie.

Internationally known for her heart research, Dr. Horackova lectured widely and published more than 50 papers in leading scientific journals. She was very involved in the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, and the Medical Research Council. In 1996, the Medical Research Council presented her with its President's Award, for receiving 26 years of continuous research funding. Two years later, she received the Greg Bonner Memorial Award, which the Heart and Stroke Foundation of New Brunswick gives each year to the researcher whose proposal to them receives the highest rating in the national peer review process. 

Her contributions to heart research will have a continuing impact. She, herself, will be remembered fondly for her kind and vibrant personality and her passionate dedication to her family, work, students and colleagues.