A Birmingham-based doctor and researcher and his colleagues were awarded a $11.2 million grant toward their research on restoring dead tissue from heart attacks.
The National Institutes of Health has awarded the five-year program project grant to Dr. Jianyi “Jay” Zhang, chair of University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Biomedical Engineering, as well as his colleagues.
Restoring dead heart tissue is challenging because mammalian hearts show almost no ability to grow new heart muscle cells after birth, according to a press release from UAB.
A discovery by Zhang and his colleagues — an experimental procedure that allowed heart muscle cell growth to be extended past birth — opened the door to the new research in what Zhang called a "remarkable" result.
The researchers at UAB and two other universities now plan to build on this discovery through three projects.
The first project will be led by Zhang and will use the novel biotechnologies developed in Zhang’s lab to further the research. The second project will be led by Dr. Daniel Garry of University of Minnesota Medical School, and the third project will be lead by led by Dr. Hesham Sadek of University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
In addition to the three projects, the grant will also fund an administrative core and a large animal core at UAB, and a bioinformatics core at the University of Minnesota Medical School.
The multi-institution National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute grant is titled, “Mechanisms that govern cardiomyocyte proliferation and remuscularization following ventricular injury.”
At UAB, biomedical engineering is a joint department of the Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine and the UAB School of Engineering, and Zhang holds the T. Michael and Gillian Goodrich Endowed Chair of Engineering Leadership. Since Zhang came to UAB in 2015, the Department of Biomedical Engineering has grown to rank fourth nationally in NIH research funding.
