Duke Cardiovascular Research Center members Nenand Bursac, PhD, Howard Rockman, MD, and Victor Dzau, MD, are part of a mulit-university team of researchers that has been tasked with creating and testing a three-dimensional "heart patch" that can literally mend a broken heart.
The National Institutes of Health awarded a consortium of researchers at Duke University, the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of Wisconsin—Madison a seven-year, $8.6 million grant to develop and test such heart patches in live animals.
“We are very excited about this opportunity to move our longstanding research in cardiac tissue engineering toward clinical practice to help patients,” said Nenad Bursac, professor of biomedical engineering at Duke. “Translating this approach to clinics will require overcoming several important challenges, and will demand every bit of combined expertise that Duke, UAB and UW-Madison have to offer.”