The Texas Heart Institute Research Symposium 2022: A Day to Celebrate Innovation, Collaboration, and Translation

During its annual day-long Research Symposium on October 20, 2022, The Texas Heart Institute community came together in the Denton A. Cooley Auditorium and by live-streamed video to hear updates from investigators in The Institute’s basic, preclinical, and clinical research groups.

The symposium opened with introductions from Darren Woodside, PhD, Vice President for Research, and Joseph G. Rogers, MD, President and CEO. Dr. Rogers welcomed the participants and commended the event’s organizers for setting aside “a day to pause and think about this very important part of The Texas Heart Institute mission.” He emphasized that research has been a core element of The Texas Heart Institute for the last 60 years and that those six decades of collective work have produced some remarkable results in cardiovascular science and medicine. Dr. Rogers described The Institute’s continued focus on innovation and the translation of fundamental discovery into improvements in cardiovascular care through invention and commercialization, reminding the audience that “the key to all of this is to improve human health.”

Research Across the Translational Science Spectrum

Presentations from the directors of each of The Texas Heart Institute research programs and centers shared the latest progress on a diverse portfolio of research projects, including several talks that specifically emphasized the translational research process. The Electrophysiology Clinical Research & Innovations group, directed by Mehdi Razavi, MD, is advancing technologies and therapies to treat arrhythmias by taking their ideas “from the napkin to the podium”—a concise way to sum up the iterative, multistep process needed to translate ideas into FDA-approved treatment options for patients—including the team’s current work on novel conductive, injectable hydrogel pacing electrodes and improved tools to bypass adhesions that interfere with epicardial procedures (i.e., those involving the outermost tissue layer of the heart). Similarly, Peter Vanderslice, PhD, Senior Investigator and Director of the Molecular Cardiology Research Laboratories, described his team’s multi-faceted application of small-molecule therapeutics—specifically antagonists and activators that target the integrin family of cell adhesion receptors involved in cell trafficking and immune responses—to potentially detect and treat atherosclerosis and inflammatory vascular disease, enhance responses to vaccines for influenza and Chagas disease, increase the effectiveness of immunotherapy products targeting solid tumors, and improve engraftment of stem cells for transplant and regenerative medicine applications.

In addition to highlighting the power of translational research to benefit human health, several presentations underscored the importance of collaborations between various labs. Camila Hochman-Mendez, PhD, Assistant Investigator and Director of Regenerative Medicine Research and the Biorepository and Biospecimen Profiling Core Laboratory, described internal collaborations with computer scientist Shaolie Hossain, PhD, fellow bioengineer Yaxin Wang, PhD, and electrophysiology expert Dr. Razavi to create new tools for tissue engineering, supporting her laboratory’s path to recellularizing donor-heart scaffolds for transplant. James Martin, MD, PhD, Director of the Cardiomyocyte Renewal Laboratory, began with an update on a collaborative, discovery-driven multiomic characterization of cardiac tissue from patients with congenital heart disease to better understand the defective genetic pathways involved in diseased cell states and hopefully manipulate those to provide new treatment strategies. He also described his team’s close partnership with THI Medical Director Emerson C. Perin, MD, PhD, and experimental experts in the THI Center for Preclinical Surgical & Interventional Research to translate their molecular understanding of the Hippo “stop growth” signaling pathway into a novel gene therapy that has the potential to repair heart damage in patients with heart failure.

Other presentations highlighted The Texas Heart Institute’s connections to research teams and industry partners across the country and around the world. O. H. Frazier, MD, Co-Director of the Center for Preclinical Surgical & Interventional Research, summarized The Institute’s decades of involvement in the development and testing of heart-assist devices, with an update on The Institute’s integral role toward moving the unique BiVACOR total artificial heart into human clinical trials.

The critical role of student scholar and trainee involvement in research programs was illustrated by the team-style presentation on heart-assist device development and improved device-testing methods from the Innovative Device & Engineering Applications (IDEA) Lab directed by Yaxin Wang, PhD, Assistant Investigator. This strong trainee contribution was also evident from the clinical research of second-year Cardiology Fellow Matthew Segar, MD, MS, who presented his machine-learning approach to identifying patients with heart failure who were more likely to have diuretic resistance.

Extensive Clinical Research Expertise

A joint presentation by THI Center for Clinical Research (CCR) Administrative Director, Casey Kappenman, MS, CCRC, and Dr. Perin, the center’s Director, described The Institute’s current clinical research efforts and the clinical trial-support services available to Texas Heart Institute investigators. Kappenman shared that there are 18 active clinical trials in the CCR portfolio and 33 additional trials in the start-up phase, and he highlighted the center’s recent internal collaborations with THI research groups and core facilities. Kappenman also noted that while principal investigator-initiated studies—those based on ideas originating from THI physicians—are an important and increasing portion of CCR’s research portfolio, industry-sponsored clinical trials represented 65% of the center’s clinical research funding, emphasizing THI’s much broader role in evaluating potential medical advances for cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Perin summarized the motivation driving the clinical research effort at The Texas Heart Institute, saying, “We are here to contribute to humanity and do things that have not been done.” As one illustration of this approach, he cited Dr. Razavi’s Saranas Early Bird bleed monitoring device as an example of an idea originating at The Institute, based on an observed unmet clinical need, that has been developed and is now readily available to clinicians as an FDA-approved product.

In a separate presentation, Stephanie Coulter, MD, THI Assistant Medical Director and Director, Center for Women’s Heart & Vascular Health, detailed the center’s clinical research projects that will leverage several THI databases and registries, including those focused on percutaneous heart valves, metabolic syndrome and obesity, pediatric cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and longitudinal health data from Houston-area women and men. The Women’s Center also leads The Institute’s community outreach initiatives and heart-health-education partnerships.

A Strong Focus on Core Services

Presentations from the leadership of each of The Texas Heart Institute core labs provided an overview of the Good Laboratory Practice (GLP)-compliant services available to investigators within and outside of The Institute. These speakers highlighted how THI’s expertise in preclinical testing, pathology services, and biospecimen storage and profiling is directly contributing to the translation of novel ideas into clinical practice. The research cores are advancing projects within The Institute as well as those of other academic institutions and outside companies, supporting progress toward new diagnostics, therapies, and devices for patients.

For example, Deborah Vela, MD, Associate Research Investigator in the Cardiovascular Pathology Research Department and Core Laboratory summarized several research studies that have successfully leveraged the core’s histology, histochemistry, immunohistochemistry, necropsy, histopathology, electron microscopy, and image analysis services, and shared that a significant portion—approximately 80%—of the workload for the Pathology core is now performed for collaborators and clients beyond The Texas Heart Institute.

Similarly, Abdelmotagaly (Abdou) Elgalad, MD, PhD, Co-Director of the Center for Preclinical Surgical & Interventional Research and Assistant Research Investigator, described the center’s recent sponsored-research testing of mechanical circulatory-assist devices, total artificial hearts, minimally invasive heart pumps, and devices to improve organ transplantation; collaborative advances in interventional cardiology technologies; and improvements to preclinical models of cardiovascular disease, which will broadly benefit the development of new therapies and devices for patients.

Lourdes Chacon-Alberty, MD, MCTM, Research Scientist and Assistant Director of the Biorepository and Biospecimen Profiling Core Laboratory also detailed the College of American Pathologists (CAP)-accredited facility’s capabilities for biospecimen processing and storage as well as cell and biomarker profiling. Automation of the biorepository’s storage capabilities through a recent equipment grant from the National Institutes of Health will benefit the independent investigators, institutions, research networks, and industry sponsors that rely on the core’s services.

Recognizing the Next Generation of Researchers

At the end of the event, Dr. Woodside presented the second annual Richard A. F. Dixon, PhD, Early-Stage Investigator Award. The award was named after Dr. Dixon, Director Emeritus in the Molecular Cardiology Research Laboratory, to honor his leadership, mentorship, and life’s work in the development of new medicines. The accolade recognizes the lead presenter among those giving the morning’s Rapid-Fire Early-Stage Investigator Presentations and was awarded to Rich Gang Li, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow from the McGill Gene Editing Lab, for his presentation “YAP Drives Assembly of a Spatially Colocalized Cellular Triad Required for Heart Renewal.”

Other presenters in this special competitive category included:

Fernanda Mesquita, PhD

Research Scientist, Regenerative Medicine Research

“Creating an ex vivo Model for Aging Using Hutchison-Progeria iPSC-derived Cardiac Cells”

Drew Bernard, BS

Research Engineer I, Electrophysiology Clinical Research & Innovations

“Mechanical Effect of Radiofrequency Ablation on the Papillary Muscle-Chordae Tendineae Junction”

Ke Li, MD

Senior Research Scientist, Center for Preclinical Surgical & Interventional Research

“How Wearable Devices Could Help Early AMI Detection”

Sai Kode, PhD

Research Engineer III, Innovative Device & Engineering Applications (IDEA) Lab

“Development of a Cardiac Model Using a Patient-Specific Elastance Function”

In his concluding remarks, Dr. Woodside captured the essence of what he described as The Texas Heart Institute research ecosystem. “Today’s presentations have covered the entire research spectrum, from discovery, to development, to clinical practice. That is what is truly unique about The Texas Heart Institute – we have clinicians who identify unmet medical needs, and we have the resources and innovators in our labs to address those needs with biologic therapies, small molecule therapies, and device development,” he said.

Dr. Woodside pointed out that the sheer volume of work being done at The Texas Heart Institute made it difficult to succinctly summarize the day’s presentations, observing, “We’re a very small institution but we do Texas-sized research, and we do it really, really well.”