Young Scientist Honored

News of Note (December 12, 2008) — Raffaella Lombardi, MD, PhD, has won the 2008 Louis N. and Arnold M. Katz Basic Science Research Prize for young investigators from the American Heart Association. The award is considered highly prestigious for the young investigators in cardiovascular sciences and is given to the best scientific presentation at the annual scientific sessions of the American Heart Association, which was held this year in New Orleans.

Left to right: Dr. Raffaella Lombardi and Dr. AJ. Marian

Dr. Lombardi presented a manuscript describing the origin of the fat cells in the heart in a disease condition referred toas arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy, which is an important cause of sudden cardiac death in the young, particularly in athletes. In this disease, excessive fat cells replace cardiac myocytes (muscle cells) in the heart, particularly the right side of the heart. She and her colleagues showed that this condition results from a genetic mutation that causes the resident stem cells to form excessive fat cells rather than cardiac myocytes.

Dr. Lombardi is a post-doctoral fellow in Dr. A. J. Marian’s group. Dr. Marian and his group work on the 9th floor of the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital—the Denton A. Building. Dr. Marian is a member of the Texas Heart Institute (THI) professional staff and is a professor of molecular medicine and internal medicine at the Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center–Houston. Other local members of the research team were Jinjinag Dong, PhD; Gabriela Rodriguez, MD; Achim Bell, PhD; and James T. Willerson, MD, President and Medical Director of THI.

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