This proposal requests support for a Keystone Symposia meeting entitled Mechanisms of Cardiac Growth, Death and Regeneration, organized by Richard N. Kitsis, Ivor J. Benjamin and Charles E. Murry, which will be held in Keystone, Colorado from February 22 - 27, 2011. Cardiovascular disease is the major cause of death in the world. Although advances have been made in our understanding of cardiac biology and pathobiology, significant conceptual and practical gaps remain. This meeting - in combination with a concurrent meeting on Molecular Cardiology: Disease Mechanisms and Experimental Therapeutics - will address these gaps by focusing on fundamental mechanisms that regulate cardiac structure, function, and repair and how they relate to human disease. These paired cardiovascular-centric meetings bring diverse areas under an umbrella focused on the heart in health and disease. While primarily basic science-based, each meeting uniquely incorporates bench-to-bedside novel therapeutics sessions with the goal of broadening the attraction of this meeting to investigators from academia, pharma, biotechnology, and in the clinical enterprise. Both meetings deal with hypertrophy and heart failure, and disease. The focus of the Mechanisms of Cardiac Growth, Death and Regeneration meeting includes stem cells and stem cell/tissue engineering, and therefore this meeting occupies a unique position with respect to cardiac stem cell biology meetings.
Myocardial infarction and heart failure are the two major cardiac syndromes that are the most common causes of mortality in the United States and the world. The Keystone Symposia meeting on Mechanisms of Cardiac Growth, Death and Regeneration addresses the molecular underpinnings of the most fundamental decisions made by cardiac cells: a) to differentiate from their progenitors;b) to grow;or c) to survive or to die. This meeting, held in tandem with a meeting on Molecular Cardiology, will involve scientific questions relevant both to the cardiovascular system and stem cell biology as a whole.
