This is a case of a rising tide lifting at least a few extra boats. It turns out a successful heart disease project we fund at Cedars-Sinai might also benefit kids with muscular dystrophy.

Eduardo Marban has been working on a disease team project to develop a way of using the heart’s own stem cells to repair damage after a heart attack. It’s a variation on this trial that helped Fred Lesikar, who we profile on our website, recover after his heart attack. In the work, Marban and his team take a small sample of a person’s heart tissue, extract heart stem cells, grow them up in the lab so there are more of the cells, then reintroduce them into the heart after a heart attack.

Catherine Jayasuriya heard about this trial and thought of her son, Dusty Brandom, who has muscular dystrophy. In addition to muscular weakness, people with the disease also have damage to their heart muscle. Coalition Duchenne, which Jayasuriya founded, has now given $150,000 to the Cedars-Sinai team to see if the stem cell approach could help people with muscular dystrophy.

In a press release about the award Jayasuriya says,

“We know that boys with Duchenne are born with a small scar in the base of their heart,” said Victor, the Burns and Allen Chair in Cardiology Research at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute. “The damage to hearts in boys with Duchenne increases over time. If we can use stem cells to slow or stop heart damage, it could help stall progression of the disease.”

We have more information on our website about funding for both heart disease and muscular dystrophy research.

A.A.