iCARE - Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells for Clinically Applicable Heart Repair

iCARE – a joint research project which is funded by the BMBF for a period of three years – officially started on April 1, 2017. In order to apply for the federal funding program “Innovative Stem Cell Technologies in Personalized Medicine”, a team was assembled headed by Prof. Ulrich Martin. This team hypothesized that the therapeutic application of iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes (CMs) is safe, and results in their structural integration and functional improvement in failing hearts. The aim of the joint project is to prepare the first worldwide clinical application of iPSC-based heart repair.

iCARE is one of the very few consortia worldwide that combines all necessary expertise and cutting edge technologies required for the clinical translation and exploitation of an iPSC-based therapy. The following departments, centers, and institutes are part of the joint project, which has been awarded a grant of more than 3 million Euro: The Department of Cardiothoracic, Transplantation and Vascular Surgery (HTTG) and the Institute of Cellular Therapeutics (ICT) of Hannover Medical School, the Fraunhofer Institute for Toxicology and Experimental Medicine (ITEM), the German Primate Center GmbH, the Centre for Ethics and Law in the Life Sciences (CELLS) of the Leibniz University Hannover (LUH), Miltenyi Biotec as well as corlife.