Heart regeneration addresses a central problem in cardiovascular medicine, the irreversible loss of myocardium after injury. True restoration of heart function can only be achieved by the replacement of lost myocardium by new, force-developing heart muscle. One option to remuscularize the injured heart is to transplant stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes, either by injection or by the application as an engineered patch. The seminar will cover our work on this approach, particularly focusing on pharmacological aspects, e.g. the mode of action. It will also discuss ideas how to translate this strategy to a clinical use.

Florian Weinberger is a group leader at the Department of Experimental Pharmacology and Toxicology. He graduated from Hamburg Medical School and received his training at the Charité, Berlin, the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf and the University of Washington, Seattle. His research focuses on cardiac regeneration. He is particularly interested in i) the development and translation of stem cell-based tissue engineered therapeutics, ii) the application of genetically engineered cardiomyocytes to study and improve cell transplantation and iii) the application of human tissue models to study cardiac physiology and disease in a dish