A Creighton University professor has received a National Institutes of Health grant to study the effects of gene and stem cell therapies in coronary artery bypass grafts.
Dr. Devendra Agrawal is a Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Clinical and Translational Research. He says in a typical coronary graft procedure, a doctor will take a vein from the leg to graft to the heart.
But he says studies have indicated this vein could be susceptible to new blockages as soon as two to three months after surgery.
It’s a four year grant. The first three years will be spent modeling his procedure on pigs to see how they do.
Agrawal says he was able to design a procedure that will correct defects in protein which cause the blockages before the vein is grafted.
"The thrombosis is the first event which occurs in the patients after coronary artery bypass graft and for that reason, almost all patients are kept on anti-thrombotic drugs but this has a lot of side effects. So my approach is to make that layer intact and, at the same time, use a gene to prevent the proliferation of the cells.”
Agrawal has already started his study and is currently working with two pigs. He says it will be important to see how these pigs are doing after 10 or 11 months.
Agrawal says pigs have similarities to humans in physiology and so are good subjects for this trial.