Cell Signaling Discovery Yields Heart Disease Clues
September 22, 2005
PORTLAND, Oregon - A pulsing heart cell is giving Oregon Health & Science University researchers insight into how it sends and receives signals, and that's providing clues into how heart disease and other disorders develop.
In a study appearing in today's edition of Nature, John Scott, Ph.D., a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and senior scientist at OHSU's Vollum Institute, found that heart muscle cells become enlarged when an intricate intracellular signaling pathway regulated by a messenger molecule called muscle-specific A-kinase anchoring proteins, or mAKAPs, is perturbed.
The cells' growth, known as cardiomyocyte hypertrophy, can lead to congestive heart failure and other forms of cardiovascular disease, which affect more than 70 million Americans and cause about 1.4 million deaths each year.
http://www.ohsu.edu/ohsuedu/newspub/releases/092205cell.cfm
