Heart muscle directly reprogrammed from another cell type | Image from Deepak Srivastava at the Gladstone Institutes

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. About 600,000 people die of heart disease every year – that’s about one in four deaths. On this blog, we’ve often written about how our grantees are progressing toward treatments for heart disease, but we wanted to pull the best of those posts into one place.

Here are some of the most interesting stories if you want to learn more about heart disease and research by CIRM grantees.

1. Where are we with stem cells for heart disease? Great summary from the BBC

2. Heart, heal thyself: CIRM grantees find chemical that may stimulate heart stem cells to repair damage after an attack

3. Synthetic patch helps speed heart repair in mice

4. ISSCR: Searching for a new model for rebuilding the heart after a heart attack

5. New approach to healing hearts gets approved for clinical trial

6. Born with half a heart but full of life and hope for the future

7. Stem cells treat heart damage – sometimes

8. Needle in a haystack search turns up compound that might mend broken hearts

9. Stem cells used to mimic heart condition in a lab dish, test therapies

10. CIRM Spotlight on Heart Failure: A stem cell trial shows promise for healing injured hearts

11. Valentine’s Day Stem Cell Wish: Mending Broken Hearts

For a complete list of heart disease research we’ve funded, see the heart disease fact sheet on our website.

Rina Shaikh-Lekso