Bridging Basic Science with Cardiac Surgery: The Bristol Heart Institute Experience

Frontiers in Surgery

Costanza Emanueli¹ 

关键词: cardiac surgery;    vascular surgery;    basic science;    translational research;    regenerative medicine;    biomarkers;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fsurg.2015.00031

学科分类：外科医学

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

It is the dream of all basic and clinical scientists to find new solutions to offer better therapies for patients. The surgeons know that they can further strive to improve their surgical techniques, but some of their interventions will remain palliative or not completely resolutive. Pediatric cardiac surgeons, in particular, suffer the frustration of having to re-operate on their patients again and again as they grow to adulthood whereas the conduits and materials used for the surgical correction do not. The currently available drugs cannot “regenerate, repair, replace” death or missing parts of the heart, valves, and blood vessels. Regenerative medicine was thought to be the answer to fill this gap. For cardiovascular scientists, this started with angiogenesis gene therapy and went on with stem cell transplantation with the hope to growth new blood vessels and even myocardial muscle (3, 4). After the initial enthusiasm, gene therapy has been in crisis for a while because it could not easily deliver the clinical success we all hoped for (5, 6). We believe that the efforts of basic scientists to improve viral and non-viral vectors and the newly identified non-coding RNA targets (especially microRNAs) will “regenerate” interest and boost more preclinical and early clinical studies in the area of therapeutic angiogenesis, cardiovascular protection and regeneration, aneurysms, and vascular graft failure.

【 授权许可】

CC BY