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 Kenneth R. Chien, MD, PhD |
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About the Director
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Scientific Director, Massachusetts General Hospital Cardiovascular Research Center
Charles Addison and Elizabeth Ann Sanders Professor of Medicine, Professor of Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School
and Harvard Stem Cell Institute
Dr. Kenneth Chien is an internationally recognized biologist specializing in cardiovascular science, as well as a pioneer in developing new therapeutic strategies to prevent the onset and progression of heart failure. Since July 2005, Ken has returned to Boston as Scientific Director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. He is a member of the
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Harvard Stem Cell Institute, where he leads the university-wide Cardiovascular Stem Cell Biology Program. Upon his return to the Harvard community, he was awarded the distinction of the first endowed chair of the Charles Addison & Elizabeth Ann Sanders Professor of Medicine. Prior to his MGH/HMS appointments, Ken directed the Institute for Molecular Medicine at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). He is a professor emeritus at UCSD, and continues his appointment as an adjunct professor of The Salk Institute.
A graduate of Harvard University, Dr. Chien went on to earn his MD and PhD from Temple University in Pennsylvania. After completing his internship, residency, and cardiology fellowship training at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, he joined the faculty of the UCSD Departments of Medicine and Cardiology and the Center for Molecular Genetics. Subsequently, Dr. Chien became the Director of the UCSD Institute of Molecular Medicine and directed the joint UCSD-Salk Institute National Institutes of Health Molecular Medicine Training Program. Given his longstanding interest in training physician-scientists, he has served as an advisor/panel member of several private biomedical foundations, including the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. He also has served as a senior consultant and board member to several biotechnology and large pharmas over the past decade, fostering collaborative ties between academia and the private sector. His most recent accomplishments include the establishment of a new Institute of Molecular Medicine at Peking University, currently the premier site for cardiovascular science and medicine in China. He has received several awards for his work, including the Pasarow Foundation Award and the Walter B. Cannon Award of the American Physiological Society.
Dr. Chien has conducted groundbreaking research focused on the molecular pathways of cardiac development and disease, much of which has been published in the top tier journals in the field of biomedical science, including Cell, Science, and Nature. Most recently, his laboratory discovered the "progenitor cells" (similar to stem cells) residing in the heart. These cells signal a particularly exciting breakthrough, as they are capable of generating functioning heart muscle cells. Since its publication in the journal Nature in 2005, this finding has recently been recognized as one of most highly cited papers in the biomedical field over the past six months. Recently, the Chien lab has discovered a "master" cardiovascular stem cell that can give rise to all three major cell types in the heart: cardiac, smooth muscle, and endothelial, and is implicated in formation of heart muscle, the heart pacemaker system, and the coronary arteries. Since this master cardiovascular stem cell can be cloned from embryonic stem cells, this new finding has significant implications both for the study of the heart development, drug discovery, and disease target identification, and for longer term potential therapeutic application of the cells to repair and replace damaged heart, pacemaker, and vascular tissue.
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