- Dr Miguel Torres, CNIC, leads a new EU project that will receive €8 million in funding over 5 years
- REANIMA addresses one of the greatest challenges in biomedicine: translating knowledge of regenerative biology from the laboratory to clinical applications, in this case regeneration of the heart
- In addition to the CNIC, another 11 European research centers are participating in this innovative project
Madrid, October 29, 2019. Research into new endogenous mechanisms of tissue regeneration is an innovative research avenue in cardiac regeneration. This is the central goal of the REANIMA project (New‐generation cardiac therapeutic strategies directed to the activation of endogenous regenerative mechanisms), a research program coordinated by Dr Miguel Torres at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC) and supported by €8 million funding over 5 years, of which €1,380,000 will be directly managed at the CNIC. The project will launch in January 2020.
“REANIMA addresses one of the big challenges in biomedicine: how to successfully translate knowledge gleaned from basic research on biological regeneration into medical applications, in this case the regeneration of the heart,” said Dr Torres.Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the world. The associated heart failure is a worldwide epidemic that imposes a heavy societal burden in death, disease, and escalating economic costs and can only be resolved by heart transplantation. The inability of the human heart to regenerate myocardium lost during a heart attack is the major factor in a high proportion of cases of heart failure. To resolve this problem, Dr Torres said that “the goal of REANIMA is to provide new therapies for heart regeneration.” Until now, clinical trials based on the introduction of stem cells into the heart have not shown regenerative capacity. However, studies of spontaneous and induced heart regeneration in animal models suggest that the path to progress lies in the reactivation of endogenous regenerative mechanisms. Fish and amphibians are able to regenerate their hearts, and although mammals have historically been considered to lack this capacity, regeneration was recently shown to occur in injured hearts of newborn mice. Unfortunately, in adult mammals, including humans, the heart’s residual capacity to regenerate is insufficient to recover function naturally.
REANIMA, said Dr Torres, “will exhaustively analyze knowledge accumulated from research in animal models in order to transform it into new regenerative therapies to resolve heart failure.” The project brings together knowledge obtained from species that can regenerate their hearts
