Seminars

Jay Schneider, M.D., Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Medicine

Dallas Heart Ball Endowed Chair for Cardiac Research

Associate Director for Regenerative Medicine

Center for Regenerative Science and Medicine

UT Southwestern Medical Center

The availability of human pluripotent stem cells capable of differentiating into cardiac, skeletal and smooth muscle cells and the ability to micro-edit the genome of these cells has begun to revolutionize our understanding of human muscle biology and diseases at molecular, cellular and tissue levels. For decades dependent on mouse studies, new advances in the understanding of human muscle cells will ultimately lead to effective molecular therapies for devastating cardiac, skeletal and smooth muscle diseases. Among the outstanding examples include the opportunity, for the first time, to study cell cycle regulatory mechanisms in dividing human cardiomyocytes, or the ability to correctively edit the muscle cell genome in cells of patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy and other muscle diseases. This talk will highlight the muscle field’s exciting new future and new clinical hopes enabled by advances in human pluripotent stem cell biology and genome editing technologies. Our molecular studies of “myocardial regeleration,” implanting alginate biopolymer hydrogel in mouse myocardium, an approach with promising success in early clinical trials, will also be presented.