Dr Philippe Menasché is a clinical cardiac surgeon at the Hospital Européan Georges Pompidou, Professor of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery at the University of Paris Descartes, and co-leader of an INSERM (National Institute of Health and Medical Research) team devoted to cell therapy of cardiovascular diseases. He also has a part-time affiliation with the Department of Biomedical Engineering of the University of Alabama in Birmingham. The group has a long-standing interest in stem cells for the treatment of heart failure. While the initial research has focused on the transplantation of skeletal myoblasts, it then moved towards the combination of cardiac progenitors derived from human embryonic stem cells with a tissue engineering-based construct. The first-in-man trial testing this cell-loaded patch has now been successfully completed. In parallel, mechanistic studies have unraveled the predominant role of paracrine signaling and, consequently, the group is now shifting its research towards a-cellular cell therapy based on the exclusive use of the secretome with the objective of further streamlining the clinical translatability of this myocardial repair strategy.
