| Meet the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Tim Kamp Professor of Medicine |
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Research area Understanding the causes of heart arrhythmias and heart failure to improve existing therapies and innovate new treatments that can regenerate healthy heart muscle.
What excites you about your work?
“It’s exciting to make discoveries that are unexpected and change the way we think about heart biology and disease–findings that point us in new directions. We’re trying to follow some of those new directions with the work we’re doing now, like this protein called LRC10. Its multifaceted role in the heart was unexpected—some of the dramatic effects it’s had—so we’re trying to understand that.”
What do you hope to achieve?
“Our lab is dedicated to understanding certain forms of heart disease—arrhythmias and heart failure. We’re digging into the mechanisms of those diseases to try to improve therapeutic approaches and find new ways to improve the adult human heart’s ability to regenerate. After an insult like a heart attack, the heart is unable to repair itself very well, so we’re trying to find new ways to deal with that major shortcoming of our bodies’ ability to repair itself—either using expression of different proteins, or cell-based therapies, like stem cell products, that can be delivered to the heart to regrow the heart muscle. We hope to impact human health with these new therapies. In the intermediate timeframe, our team is hoping to get them through studies in animal models to show their efficacy and their safety before trying them in people. We’re getting closer; we have animal studies that are promising.”
Tim’s lab explores arrhythmia and heart failure using human heart cells to prompt muscle regeneration and improve therapies for people with heart disease. WARF appreciates our partnership with Tim as he works to improve millions of people’s lives.
– Andy DeTienne, WARF, Director of Licensing
Want to learn more?
Andy DeTienne, [email protected], 608.960.9857