healing from a broken heart

henrietta sussman grew up in the boyleheights area of east los angeles. at fifteen years old she contractedpolio and spent a week in an iron lung until her body was ableto mount a response and fight off the infection. that experience gave her a uniqueappreciation for the power of research and science which she passed on to her son. that's basically what drove me to becomea scientist in the first place my mother's love of discovery andknowledge and asking questions that haven't beenanswered yet and

figuring out something for the firsttime. you being the first person in the world toknow something that nobody else knows she said is the biggest rush that youcan have as a person and that's what i get every day when icome in here. sussman leads a lab at the sdsu heartinstitute that is revolutionizing treatments for heart disease the leadingkiller in the us. a broken bone or a torn muscle can healitself but until recently it was assumed cellsdamaged during a heart attack or stroke could never be repaired. now scientistshave found heart cells not only

regenerate but have the capacity to heal brokenhearts. so you think about that. that while your heart is doing this, every second while you're alive, the cells are slowly disappearingand new cells are forming and so by the timeyou get to be fifty half of the cells that are in your heartthat are muscle cells you weren't born with which is a totally different idea from what we were taught when iwas going to school.

armed with this finding, sussman and hiscolleagues focus on helping heart cells regenerate faster and stronger. how doyou take that process which is a relatively slow one doesn'tneed to be fast because it's happening over your entire lifetime, can you compress that? can you make that kind of repair, speed it up so thatinstead of it happening over the course of your lifetime you can happen in a year. pearl quijada, a phdstudent in sussman's lab is helping answer that question.

so our idea is that if we take astem-cell which we can isolate and not just our labbut lots of labs around the world can isolate these stem cells and we injected them into the heart, that these cells can actually turn intothe cells that are needed to cause the heart topump up again. like sussman, quijada found inspirationfrom her family. one of the main diseases in my family iscardiovascular disease. both my uncles have suffered heart attacks. one of my unclesactually passed away because of a heart attack or areoccurring heart attack.

so it's sort of like in our family it's sort of like a way of life. quijada knows herwork could improve the future for her family. i think about maybe like my youngerbrother or my sisters who are gonna get married and theyhave families and the therapies that we'redeveloping in the lab could potentially be helping them. therapies are currently in clinicaltrials and sussman sees tremendous potential.

this isn't just for the cardiac tissue,that this enhancement to repair could be expandedto brain tissue, bone, many other types oftissue which traditionally have not been known to be able to regenerate we can enhance the regenerative potential of all of those tissues. sussman's mom died in 2003, but her presence is still felt through his work. my momall through her life and up till the end was alwaystrying to teach me and get me to recognize there are new ways ofunderstanding and looking at things.

she would be pretty proud of what we'veaccomplished she be happy that her initial desire to want to see me go into sciencewas realized and that i've managed to be successful at creating agroup of people who do the kind of work that she thought was so important. and i think she'd still be telling me that i could be doing it better if i'd listened to her.